Over the years, I have been monitoring the analytics software market with a quite simple requirement: I am (still) looking for a tool to let me generate full data pipelines quickly from a browser with the least amount of code. As an analyst, I don’t have the luxury of time that developers and data scientists have, I need to crank out pipelines quickly and can’t waste my clients’ time futzing with a Command Line Interface. A nice UI makes the documentation of a complex process much easier. I also want the ability to look at the actual data at each stage while I develop a long process, without having to devise each time a fancy query just for testing. Last but not least, I need frictionless provisioning and deployment, à la Snowflake: just sign up on a webpage and start using without having to summon any AWS engineers nor other IT / Dev Ops rare resource. Believe it or not, that market is still up for grab, as I haven’t found a decent solution yet. All the products I tried have significant flaws. Here are a few, I have evaluated:
- Alteryx Designer Cloud
- Fivetran
- SnapLogic
- Dell Boomi
- DBT Cloud
- Matillion
- Denodo
- Paxata
- Pentaho
- Rivery
- Unifi
- Xplenty
- Lyftron
- Prophecy
- Getlore
- Domo Magic ETL
- Dataiku
- Tableau Prep
- Databricks Delta Lake
I would say the ones coming closer to that vision are Matillion, Dataiku and Domo in its recent iterations with Magic ETL. All the others fail, in their current state, by being too expensive, too limited or way too complex (looking at you Delta Lake). There is still room for new entrants as this market segment is far from being satisfied. Analysts are usually happy to pay within reason for solutions that boost their productivity.
I have been paying close attention to the solutions available, monitoring fairly easily the relevant ones going to market with Snowflake, through their Partner Connect awesome feature. Yet, I recently came across one of those new entrants, a solution that is Snowflake centric, but not yet present on Snowflake Partner Connect, called Datameer. It offers what I deem a compelling positioning statement:
Datameer is a multi-persona SaaS solution for low code data transformation in Snowflake
Working from a browser without having to install any application, nor patches, that is refreshing. Now, is Datameer delivering on the promise? Read on for my test of an early release…
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