Lightdash

I've recently posted on medium an article series, "BI Infrastructure Without Robbing a Bank: a complete tutorial in 5 parts". In it I share what I think is something many might have missed with the data landscape changing ever so quickly - that the freemium BI ecosystem has finally come into a long-awaited maturity. Majority of my professional life during the last 4 years was spent freelancing among various projects and companies. And my usual role there was to come help build their BI infrastructure, usually from some rather rudimentary point. The responsibilities of a data solution architect gave me the chance to touch the majority of the most popular tools around. My typical clients were tech startups and e-commerce companies, so, sure enough, this gives a somewhat partial view. Nevertheless, I came to find the repeating requirements among the different businesses, and the tools best filling those requirements. This, in various flavors, became my current favorite stack, consisting mainly of: dbt, Airbyte, Lightdash, and Kestra, self-hosted on GCP. For my friends in data - many of whom I've already discussed this stack with on many occasions - this is an (I hope) easy-to-follow tutorial, which you could follow as a weekend's project and hands-on test all the components of the stack. Best part - all the tools are free to use (you pay for cloud services only). Some of the tools are, perhaps, already your bread and butter, though it might be fun to sit down again and try setting all of them up from scratch. The tutorial link is here: https://lnkd.in/dUcDnDPm Also, if you want to discuss or share your experience with the listed tools -please do! I am pretty hyped to hear others' experiences. Happy reading! dbt Labs Airbyte Lightdash Kestra Vėjai

Lightdash (YC S20) has raised $11 million in Series A funding to bring AI to business intelligence. Today, hundreds of companies use Lightdash as their business intelligence platform. Data teams love it for its robust development workflows, semantic layer support, and seamless integration with tools like dbt, which provides a single source of truth for their data. Data teams aim to function like software teams, but outdated tools have hindered their progress. Lightdash brings best practices from software engineering to analytics, creating a workflow that empowers data developers and allows more team members to access data independently. In the past two years, usage has grown over 50x, with two queries being answered every second on the platform. Notably, over 80% of daily active users are non-data team members finding answers on their own. Lightdash enables a true self-serve business intelligence experience, where anyone can explore data through an easy-to-use interface, share insights with teammates, and embed analytics for customers. Next up, Lightdash is launching an AI Analyst service that lets users chat with their data in natural language to receive relevant insights. Powered by the same semantic layer used across Lightdash, the AI Analyst allows users to get set up quickly and provides accurate answers right away. Congrats on the Series A, Hamzah Chaudhary, Oliver Laslett, and team Lightdash! https://lnkd.in/gZj3Qhyg

Let's go! It's time to build and ship 🚀🚀🚀

Just 3 days until #Coalesce2024 kicks off ⏳ A massive thank you to our incredible Platinum Sponsors: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Tableau, and Snowflake, and a huge shoutout to our Gold Sponsors: Firebolt, Omni, Hex, Sigma Computing, Lightdash, Zenlytic, and Metaplane. Their partnership is making Coalesce bigger and better than ever. We can't wait to see you in Vegas 🎉 But don’t worry if you can’t make it in person — there's still time to join us virtually from anywhere in the world 💻 Grab your virtual spot now: https://bit.ly/3M5FMlP

I normally don't do long posts, but the latest changes we've shipped at Lightdash made the data person in me really proud. So, I wanted to share it. 6 years ago, I created the first onboarding videos for our BI tool at Monzo Bank (shout out to the "Lookin' Good" fans). I was amazed at how powerful a good BI tool could be in enabling not just the data team, but the whole company to use data in decision-making. 5 years ago, I used dbt Labs for the first time. I remember the excitement of being able to confidently build and test changes, all from the comfort of my command line. I didn't have to wake up at 6AM, watching our Airflow jobs run, making sure my changes hadn't broken core company metrics, because I had dbt now. I loved the semantic approach to BI, and I loved dbt, but every BI I tried made it feel like business logic was scattered and repeated between the two. So, I joined Hamzah and Oliver to build Lightdash. That was nearly 4 years ago. And today, the team has shipped some changes to Lightdash that make it truly feel like the BI tool with the best dbt integration. You can still connect Lightdash to your dbt project and instantly turn it into a full stack BI platform. But now, we also let you create and save models directly to dbt, from within Lightdash. No more scattered business logic. No more complicated pipelines to promote your data models. Just a great, seamless data workflow. So, to all the data people who love dbt, and who love BI, I'd suggest you check it out. Because it's pretty sweet.

This latest feature drop is the cherry on top of the data developer workflow in Lightdash! You can now push your ad-hoc exploration work from Lightdash all the way back to your dbt project, all from within Lightdash. It's kinda magic, check out Katie's blog post and demo video on how it works 🪄

Data friends! Anyone at 🎰 Coalesce Vegas 🎰 next week? Would love to meet up with all your precious faces. I'm free for coffee anytime or breakfast if you're at Resorts World, just DM me. Of course I'll also be tie-dying all day on the booth! Come over to Booth 207 (we're hard to miss)

Data friends! Anyone at 🎰 Coalesce Vegas 🎰 next week? Would love to meet up with all your precious faces. I'm free for coffee anytime or breakfast if you're at Resorts World, just DM me. Of course I'll also be tie-dying all day on the booth! Come over to Booth 207 (we're hard to miss)

Another event collab we've got going on at Coalesce this year! Tuesday 8th October, we're hosting a dinner for data leaders and friends of Lightdash and SYNQ! Expect great food 🍣 and sake 🍶. Drop a comment or DM me if you want to be added to the invite!

Is anyone I know going to be at Coalesce this year? I'll be there with Lightdash and we are hosting drinks with our friends from Hex, Metaplane, Brooklyn Data Co. (a Velir company), Hightouch and Atlan. Come say hello! Link to sign up in the comments.