This is the second part of our series covering Business Intelligence tools. Our previous post was on Metabase. What we’ll cover in this post is the widely popular MySQL based analytics tool, Redash. You can easily access a demo of Redash by going to the following link and logging in using any Google account.
In this series we will cover the four following applications:
Overview
Redash is a powerful analytics tool and is perfect to work as an add-on that an existing database you have the permissions to connect to. It’s best suited to work with teams that have a degree of technical programming knowledge as it comes to creating MySQL queries. Redash can’t be used without someone who has a background in MySQL, fortunately, MySQL is relatively easy to learn and there are lots of resources online that can guide you, here is one we like. 
It has strong community support. For a long time now Redash has had a vibrant online community to help answer your questions as well as move the product forward. There are thousands of people that have contributed towards making Redash better and we expect this to only keep going.
There are a large number of databases that one can choose from when wanting to connect with Redash. Here are but just a few:
- Amazon Athena
- Amazon Aurora
- Cassandra
- Elasticsearch
- Hive
- mongoDB
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
Its simplicity is also one of Redash’s strong suits. There are only three main navigation menu items:
- Dashboards
- Queries
- Alerts
Which is refreshing to see, especially as more and more BI tools try to pack everything into their product.
Alerts
One of our favorite Redash features are the reminders and automatic notifications that a user can intuitively set. These alerts can be particularly useful when you want a group of people or a specific individual to be notified when a specific query reaches a set value.
Visualizations
The biggest pro is that Redash provides a very vast array of different visualizations that users can create. The variety of visualizations, though not as easy to create as in Metabase, is very wide.
Obstacles
Redash is not very accessible to non-technical users as far as query creation and database set up goes. Even when your non-technical team has had some database connections and queries set up by more technical members, they will still need to work with a more technical person if they want to get more out of their queries. To some extent, all BI tool users will face this issue, as is expected, but comparing Redash to Metabase in this regard, Metabase is the clear winner as it tries to give the non-technical user as much power as possible.
Conclusion
If you have experience with MySQL and want to use an analytics tool that combines simplicity with strong visualization, Redash is one of the best options out there. We highly suggest you try out the demo of the product online and get your hands dirty.
