Sigma Computing

Sigma has the right model.

From the user perspective, the columnar formula editing feels familiar enough, and the learning curve is friendly to anyone with spreadsheet experience.

From an architect perspective, the semantic layer is lightweight and easy to adapt to ever-changing schemas. The UI covers most of the functionality you'll want, and for everything else you can fall back on writing your own code, like cron strings or SQL queries. I let Sigma do probably 95% of my querying, leaving the gnarliest 5% for me to write in their SQL runner.

I do a significant amount of lightweight ELT work in Sigma as well. I like being able to write massive views that I know I'm going to have to update often, and just like Snowflake / Sigma materialize them for me. When I use Sigma to query S3 directly in the SQL runner - usually to POC some new data that hasn't made its way out to the business teams yet - this functionality is really convenient because those queries are not efficient. I just need to get new data in front of the business as quickly as possible.

Visual discovery is lacking when compared to mature tools like Tableau. Sigma needs to continue chipping away at the Tableau features around dashboarding and charting.

* Ability to pull any data I need or want
* Complexity of calculations possible while being easy to use
* Seriously those grouping levels are VERY powerful

* Pivot tables are the one thing they haven't aced yet - you can make them but then to calculate cased on them you need to make a new dataset and then a new sheet. You can do pretty much all the same work with just levels though so I don't miss them too often.
* I wish my default permissions could be "public" - I'm never doing anything private, so why is that the default?
* Maps could use some work. I want to color-map countries, not just display dots

Ease of use, especially the ability to write custom SQL queries to build datasets and reports. The visualization builder is also very user friendly and has made throwing together dashboards for internal or external use significantly easier. Saves me and my colleagues a ton of time!

There have been some features identified by the team that we need for Enterprise-level software that were missing, many have been addressed though. A major bugbear of mine is that the filters don't seem to react to each other if there are multiple on a dashboard, they filter independently of other inputs.