Turn queries into easy-to-use tools your teammates can share.

Parameterize! Visualize! Collaboratize?!

qwaver links: Intro • Help! • Installation • Thanks

The Fascinating Story

If you're like me, you have hundreds of queries stored in your DB admin tool for several connected DBs. A lot your time is spent searching through them, altering WHERE clauses, exporting the results, plotting charts, and emailing the results (chart + data + query for validation). Often you've got others on your team doing the exact same thing re-inventing the wheel left and right.

Then this happens:

Boss: Hey, do you have time for business question involving our database?

You: Sure! Give me 20 minutes..

17 minutes later...

You: Here you go! See attached chart and data!

Boss: Thanks! could you do like 100 similar variations with different time periods and countries?

Your skills as a query artist were definitely needed that first time, but the second time the need comes from that person you're helping not having any experience with queries at all.

• Q: Don't other tools out there help with this?
  • A: Yeah, but they all require you (shudder) learn a new platform. Be it a "simple" markup language (lookin' at you, Looker) or some sort of intricate UI designed more for dashboards than actually getting insights. You already know your query language, let's leverage that strength!

Help!

Helping with this project will make you one of the cooler people that I know. How can I (meaning you) do that?

• Easy: Give this project a ⭐️!
• Easy: Kick the tires. qwaver.io has the latest version running.
• Easy: Edit this file and make a PR to add any feature requests.
• Easy: If you're in the code and see where something could be improved, but can't make the improvement right then, add # TODO comment with a helpful description of what needs to be done and submit a PR.

Feature requests

Big, important things:

• First time user flow:
  • create user
  • create / join organization (if invites apply)
  • create database if none in organization
• An invitation system allowing people to invite others to their organization and for people to review/accept/decline invitations
• JS charts on pages
• qwavers (esp. those with parameters) can be APIs as well
• Query collections -- user-defined lists of queries that all conform to a given topic

Small but cool things:

• set query type to: automatic, table, bar chart, line chart, pie or pivot
• test database connection when adding new database
• webpage preview when sharing results via slack or email
• flag queries -- if their results do no align with their title/description or are wrong in any other way
  • Search results should not include flagged queries
  • The author of a flagged query should be given an alert
• card layout for home page
  • use .card-columns in parent div
  • use .stretched-link:
• track average execution time for queries

General improvements

If you see any ways that the app could be improved in these ways, let's work on it!

• data security -- of paramount importance. In no way do we want a user to have access to data from an organization to which they do not belong
• performance -- This needs to be SNAPPY!
• HTML/CSS styling
• unit tests
• support for more databases

Installation

qwaver is already up and running on qwaver.io

If you want to run locally:

• manage.py
  • createsuperuser
  • makemigrations
  • migrate

Environment variables: DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=qwaver.settings

Run python server, go to localhost

Thank yous

• Much of the user management code has been based on the snippets made available by Corey Schafer. He made an excellent tutorial on learning Django by walking through how to make a blog with many users. qwaver is basically a blog but for queries so it was a nice starting point!