Sigma

Vorteile: The speed with which I'm able to pull together disparate data and generate some useful insights. The Dashboard functionality has been particularly useful in creating reporting our teams can use with customers and prospects.

Nachteile: Version management and permissions. It's hard to keep everyone looking at the same version of a document, to view data, a document is created and generically named, so our folder system is getting very full and hard to navigate. Additionally, there's no way to tell if another user will be able to see a given document without asking them to try viewing it, and there's no way for them to request view access to that document.

Kommentare: I think is a nice tool, is easy to use and it's fast. You can load your data and start analyzing it very fast, also, it's a nice tool for non technical users, but when I need more features or power I rather to use Data Studio

Vorteile: Is an easy to use software, I liked that it's very fast, I don't have to wait to start seeing the data

Nachteile: It needs more features, specially to migrate the worksheets to different environments, also it has a very limited number of functions. Sometimes the error messages are not very descriptives, so we can't know what's happening or how to solve it (we had a worksheet with an error like: "the joins are not efficient", something like that, so that message was kind of useless)

Kommentare: It has been great. The tool fit very naturally into my companies data flow and getting _explorable_ data into stakeholders hands. We also have a more static dashboarding tool that excels at that, but is weak for exploration.
Sigma also makes my job as an analyst easier by making data sets explorable using point-n-click tools vs code

Vorteile: Makes 'easy' queries very easy to work on and see results visually immediately. Natural way to think about grouping objects but still showing the 'row' level data is amazing and a huge selling point on getting non data people to use the sheets shared with them.
Makes the mental structuring of large undertakings choppable into smaller to-do's and then joining sheets together

Nachteile: Expanding on my point in my pro's about chunking down large undertakings to smaller conceptual efforts per sheet.... this is not very performant. I have two projects where I create a base sheet and then have 2-6 sheets built off of it before potentially joining them back together to combine the aspects I've added. This however, results in the base sheet/query being run numerous times and is often times a time consuming query to begin with. In a code based environment this could be made more performant by using a WITH statement so it only has to execute once and can then be used multiple times Joins have to be exact matches (no date comparison) and can only be on original columns from the data source. Therefore, if a column must be switched from integer to string, you have to create a reference to the sheet before being able to join to other tables.

Kommentare: Overall I have access to more than our previous reporting system, which is a positive. However, as self serve as it is I wish connecting tables and validating was more straightforward as a user.

Vorteile: I like how customizable it is. From a good basic report I can move things around to suit my needs. In addition it has many options for how to export, which is great as I use excel for more complex files & google sheets for collaborating & sharing findings.

Nachteile: Load times to get to a report or filter can be killer for some reports that pull from many data sources, and have large amounts of information. The permissions are a bit annoying when a report is created for me by an admin, but I am the report owner (as it was made for my department), but I can't make my own changes (w/o admin privlidges) and archive the main one. In these cases, I have to request the admin to make the changes, or make a copy and publish my own report and again contact the admin to delete or move the report so that mine is the one the team goes to first.

Kommentare: While Sigma could be great for a lot of use cases, there is one in particular that I use it for. Every month I have a summary report that I have to put together. I used to run multiple database queries, dump the data out into Excel, do some manual sorting and manipulation of the data, and then build out pivot tables so that I could see trends month over month. Sigma takes care of all of the data fetching, formatting, and styling for me (and lets me do it in a way that turns out better than I had in Excel).
Doing the reports this way, now saves me about 5 hours a month off of that monthly report that I was doing, which means that I have more time for data exploration, and spend less time with data garbage collection.

Vorteile: I love the ability to build out extra columns in my data visually, which lets me build pivot tables that I cannot even replicate in Excel.
Having built out tables once, I can reuse them again and again with fresh data without having to pull and manually re-translate everything like I used to do.
Having the ability to change the type of data in a column to a new structure saves me a lot of time.
Extracting JSON from my tables is a snap!

Nachteile: While the documentation is good, I wish there was a little better messaging around error handling. Sigma formatting is slightly different from the PostgreSQL that I am used to.
I wish that there was a little more visual punch to the charts I can make.