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I don't get Datasette. I had a small dataset I wanted to use with it, hoping it would be some sort of moderately advanced FOSS BI software, but all it did was give me a table view.

I haven't managed to find a use case for it.




I'd really love to hear more about your use-case and expectations here.

The feature I use most often for exploring new data is facets - I explain those in the tutorial here: https://datasette.io/tutorials/explore#using-facets

By default Datasette doesn't include visualizations, but those can be added as extra plugins. Two of the most popular are https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-vega for charts and https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-cluster-map for geographical data, e.g. on https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan...

In terms of use-cases: I've recently started asking people who use it what job they hired it to do. One of the leading answers is for data publishing - they use it as a tool to quickly publish data online for others to use:

    datasette publish cloudrun mydatabase.db --service my-database
https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/publish.html


Thanks for replying, Simon! I guess my use case was a bit of a toy, I don't have a huge dataset to use facets on, I basically just made a small spreadsheet of blood tests and wanted to see if I could easily navigate the data better than what Excel did. I did install Vega, but it had basically one way to display data (I didn't look into it too much, though).

I think my use case was just not suitable for it, from your answer I guess it's more for people who have huge datasets they want to publish. I imagine it will be much better suited for that purpose, though I tried the demo a few times and couldn't really think of any interesting questions to ask it, so I didn't get it there either...

Datasette is one of those things that sounds very promising, so I want to explore it, but I end up walking away every time. It just sounds like it's not for me, though.


Yeah for that kind of data Excel will definitely be more useful.

Datasette starts getting interesting with data that's too large for Excel - or data with multiple tables where SQL joins start coming into play.


That makes sense, I'll see if I can find a very large dataset I'm interested in to try it, thank you!


I had the same vision last year and after talking with Simon and other contributors, I came up with the Datasette Dashboards plugin: https://github.com/rclement/datasette-dashboards

It is still very alpha but usable if you know Vega syntax.

Looking for some contributors to bring Datasette to the level of Metabase!


I hadn't checked this out in quite a while and WOW - it is looking so good! That demo really is beautiful: https://datasette-dashboards-demo.vercel.app/-/dashboards/jo...



Thank you Simon, this is truly appreciated!



Oh that looks great, thank you!




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