Creating charts and dashboards can actually be fun
Dear Data-Traveller, please note that this is a LinkedIn-Remix.
I posted this content already on LinkedIn in August 2022, but I want to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the social network abyss.
For your accessibility-experience and also for our own content backup, we repost the original text here.
Have a look, leave a like if you like it, and join the conversation in the comments if this sparks a thought!
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No, this is not just hype – The benefits of the metrics layer are real.
People who know me also know that I like to spend as less time as possible creating charts and dashboards. You want to get my mood to be desperate. Let me make a six pages dashboard.
When I tried out Lightdash a while ago for the first time, I rediscovered something valuable to me: the metrics layer. I used a similar approach when working with Looker. And I did not realize how much I missed it in all the other BI tools.
You define the metrics layer for Lightdash in dbt. Just where you define your models, your tests, your documentation…
The initial dimensions and metrics/measures are defined in no time (took me some time to figure out the syntax, but then it was a 30m effort).
And then building the first chart by just dropping the defined metrics and dimensions into a chart is just joy. No more inline SQL things or fiddling with filters.
For my podcast, I sat down with Oliver Laslett, one of the founders of Lightdash and we talk about the metrics layer a lot but also why it is a good idea to build a new product in a crowded space and so much more.
I am pretty sure you will enjoy our conversation. Link as always in the comments. And make sure to subscribe to the podcast page, so you don’t miss the next episode which will drop in 14d (yes, I am ramping up my release performance).
Link to the episode: https://share.transistor.fm/s/cf85df45
Link to the podcast page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/meet-the-analytics-stack-podcast