Today we will examine and try to get to the bottom of one tool that is quite famous nowadays – Redash. The tool is extremely convenient due to the fact that it can work with Clickhouse. All the other developers of BI-tools don’t support Clickhouse. Just recently, an ODBC driver has appeared for Tableau.

I will make a short review of Redash’s useful features, and in the following number of posts I will figure out which useful requests and reports can be constructed using Redash.

Redash Homepage

So, what is Redash? It is the tool for on-demand analytics, moreover it can be used on completely different databases. For instance, Redash can be connected to a database under MySQL or HP Vertica.
The main thing, proposed by Redash is a handy console for writing SQL-queries to a database.

Console for writing SQL-queries

Consequently, the first major observation: in order to use Redash you should know SQL or have an employee in team who knows SQL.
Apart from the basic console, Redash provides visualization tools (inter alia, construction of Funnel-charts, cohort analysis and pivot tables (however, the functionality of the latter is very limited)), as well as tools for construction of dashboards and alert systems (via mail or in slack).
Let’s examine the basic console a bit more thoroughly. A user has an access to some useful features: application of filters, multifilters and query’s parameters:

Simultaneous application of parameters, filters and multifilters in queries

Further, opportunities of visualizations should be mentioned separately. They are, indeed, convenient and extensive, especially considering that one can set automatic updating of query results in accordance with the required timetable.
In the following note we will discuss visualization in Redash more closely, and later – construction of dashboards and alert systems.