YMMV, but in our experience the vast majority of the hours logged in the 'self-serve' pivot table interface of a BI system come from folks who actually do know SQL and have the word analyst in their title.
When you look at session data on non-technical people doing things with those pivot table interfaces, they are almost never doing the 'complex exploratory analysis' that BI vendors advertise. They are either doing sequential lookups of individual records, or they are putting together a simple data pull so that they can do something in a spreadsheet.
We think we can address the bulk of these use cases by providing two components: a lightweight pivot table, and a 'download to excel' button. These would be components like any other chart or graph. Outputs.
We think a pivot table is a nice output for some situations, we just don't think your data team should have to use a pivot table interface to produce the whole reporting system.
YMMV, but in our experience the vast majority of the hours logged in the 'self-serve' pivot table interface of a BI system come from folks who actually do know SQL and have the word analyst in their title.
When you look at session data on non-technical people doing things with those pivot table interfaces, they are almost never doing the 'complex exploratory analysis' that BI vendors advertise. They are either doing sequential lookups of individual records, or they are putting together a simple data pull so that they can do something in a spreadsheet.
We think we can address the bulk of these use cases by providing two components: a lightweight pivot table, and a 'download to excel' button. These would be components like any other chart or graph. Outputs.
We think a pivot table is a nice output for some situations, we just don't think your data team should have to use a pivot table interface to produce the whole reporting system.