MechanicalTwerk

I took a deeper look at the Dataset portion of your product this morning and it definitely piqued my interest. It wasn't clear to me from your original post and my initial scan of your site that there was a way to create queries/models/views (whatever folks want to call them, they're essentially the same concept) on top of the single activity table and then either materialize them or integrate them with other services via webhooks or native API integrations. That's definitely super useful. Also, the "Relationship" concept does a nice job of trying to approach joins/window functions in plain english. Query builders are always a difficult UX problem and I think you're onto something interesting. Finally, the validation, identity resolution and spend features are also nice and I could see you adding value via more features in this vein in the future.

The main thing this product strikes me as is "The ETL tool that understands your business". Whereas the domain language of most ETL tools is at the level of DW technologies (rows, columns, schemas, facts, dimensions, indexes, join algos, views, dags, orchestration schedules), the domain language of Narrator is at the level of the business (activities, customers, relationships, spend, etc). In a way it's sort of similar to the old convention over configuration religious war. I could see companies using Narrator for the 80% of ETL that is just plain table stakes in order to compete nowadays and offloading most of the definition and minor customization of this ETL to less technical folks. And maybe in parallel the data engineers would use plain old code to do the last 20% of ETL that is truly proprietary and specific to the business.

Not sure if my biased initial reading of your pitch was off but it seemed like you were focusing heavily on addressing the pain points of the star schema. I've found that most people fall into two camps: either they don't care at all about the kimball star schema world and they're just loading tables however they see fit into their warehouse or they are willing to go to their grave defending the star schema and its variants. In either case, I don't think you gain much by positioning yourself as the antidote to the star schema. I think you could capture customers in both camps by focusing instead on the fact that your ETL tool has a deep understanding of how companies that rely heavily on a web presence work. I think this would also better align you with the ability to increase your customers' revenue as opposed to optimizing engineering/infrastructure concerns which is an easier sell.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. I'm going to shoot you a short email in case you want to connect.

> activities and how they relate

This is the problem with EAV/nosql/schemaless/etc and ultimately the problem I think you are going to have to solve. Instead of using ETL to model how the activities relate and reifying that model as database objects, EAV just kicks the can down the road to the query/BI tool.

Sprawl - The BI tool will end up containing most of the real business logic sprawled across many reports.

Single source of truth - A lot of the reports will be very similar but they will be based off slightly different activities or slightly different filtering logic. Which report is the correct one?

Traceability - I think this is more of an end-to-end "garbage-in, garbage-out" problem that all ETL/BI tools have that wouldn't be specific to your tool. It's more of an organizational/people problem.

Coherent model - In my experience, EAV isn't enough to cover the breadth of analyses mature businesses need to do and most business users won't be able to wrap their head around it. There will have to be some data person that creates a more coherent, tabular/spreadsheet-like model and in the case of this tool it looks like that model will have to exist in the BI tool. Which brings us back to sprawl/single source of truth issues.

Just some thoughts. But always glad to see more people working on stuff like this!

Edit - one last thing I wanted to mention. I think in reality you are going to find it takes more than ~25 lines of sql to define activities. That may be the case if the source is a schema that gets spit out of something like Stitch, but many other schemas in the wild will take a lot more than 25 loc to massage into your 11 column schema.

I agree we can be almost certain that there are violations that aren't being captured on video and therefore the true number of violations is actually higher (assuming all the instances presented are violations). What matters is how the true number compares to the total number of interactions and if that ratio is acceptable to society. The absolute number of violations caught on video and the comparison of that number to similar numbers in other professions doesn't really say anything.

To be fair there's way more people filming the police right now than any of those professions so I wouldn't expect the number of mishaps on video to be comparable.

Haven't used Chartio in a while but when I did the reverse ssh tunnel was just a standard reverse ssh that you could deploy on any server in your vpn. It doesn't have to be on the actual db server, it could be on its own server acting as a bridge between Chartio and your db. Also, you could use whatever ssh client you wanted - you didn't have to install anything from Chartio in your vpn.

I agree with pretty much everything you've said. However, as someone who has used Chartio extensively, I'd say 20 is wayyy too low. It can definitely handle 100s. But, like you said, 1,000s is a struggle for anyone.

Also, if you think this is a rip off of LookML, you should take a look at what GitLab is doing with Meltano. They completely jacked LookML.

Yea but this is sort of akin to cramming. Some of the deeper stuff in CS and engineering, at least for me, took time to ponder and spaced repetition. I don't think 1500 hours or whatever it is over 9 months is quite the same as 1500 over 2 years.

I'm confused. That is not the original post that I was commenting on. The original post I commented on called Martin Shkreli one of the shittiest human beings on the face of the earth. I could be missing something though...maybe it got edited? Is it possible to give some more info on how/why/where this got detached?

EDIT: Never mind. I'm dumb. I see that flagged comment now. My bad.

I said nothing of his criminality or ethics. I just said he's not one of the shittiest human beings on the face of the earth. I mean you could kind of argue that OP thinks it's a race to the bottom, not me.

One of the shittiest human beings on the face of the earth? Really? There are people alive today who have committed mass genocide. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they are probably shittier human beings than Martin Shkreli. So no, not concrete enough.

People need to seriously get over themselves. The world is not fair. Life is not fair. Neither of them ever have been and neither of them ever will be. Every city has major problems. Every person experiences tragedy. Up and moving to a new city is just a band-aid. You'll see that new city through rose colored glasses at first. But after a few years those rose colored glasses will become a lot clearer and you'll see a lot of the same problems from SF with some new ones mixed in. Life is a struggle, not an endless search for some perfect city or perfect life. No one owes you anything. Your coworkers don't owe you a conversation about politics or art. The wealthy don't owe you a pristine city. Death doesn't owe you the guarantee it won't take your loved ones before their time. The struggle is real, and it is real for everyone. It doesn't discriminate based on age, gender, race, wealth or any other dimension. The people who have it the best in life are those who have accepted this fact and dedicated themselves to working within the struggle to achieve the most they can for the people and causes they care about in the short time they have.