Sigma

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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!

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

I like how customizable it is. From a good basic report I can move things around to suit my needs. In addition it has many options for how to export, which is great as I use excel for more complex files & google sheets for collaborating & sharing findings.

Inconvénients

Load times to get to a report or filter can be killer for some reports that pull from many data sources, and have large amounts of information. The permissions are a bit annoying when a report is created for me by an admin, but I am the report owner (as it was made for my department), but I can't make my own changes (w/o admin privlidges) and archive the main one. In these cases, I have to request the admin to make the changes, or make a copy and publish my own report and again contact the admin to delete or move the report so that mine is the one the team goes to first.

Avantages

Love the dataset -> spreadsheet -> dashboard usage model

Seamless integration with Snowflake

Inconvénients

User admin/roles functionality is not as easy and consistent to administer as it should be

Avantages

Is an easy to use software, I liked that it's very fast, I don't have to wait to start seeing the data

Inconvénients

It needs more features, specially to migrate the worksheets to different environments, also it has a very limited number of functions. Sometimes the error messages are not very descriptives, so we can't know what's happening or how to solve it (we had a worksheet with an error like: "the joins are not efficient", something like that, so that message was kind of useless)