**_re:dash_** is our take on freeing the data within our company in a way that will better fit our culture and usage patterns.
Prior to **_re:dash_**, we tried to use tranditional BI suites and discovered a set of bloated, technically challenged and slow tools/flows. What we were looking for was a more hacker'ish way to look at data, so we built one.
**_re:dash_** was built to allow fast and easy access to billions of records, that we process and collect using Amazon Redshift ("petabyte scale data warehouse" that "speaks" PostgreSQL).
1.**Query Editor**: think of [JS Fiddle](http://jsfiddle.net) for SQL queries. It's your way to share data in the organization in an open way, by sharing both the dataset and the query that generated it. This way everyone can peer review not only the resulting dataset but also the process that generated it. Also it's possible to fork it and generate new datasets and reach new insights.
2.**Dashboards/Visualizations**: once you have a dataset, you can create different visualizations out of it, and then combine several visualizations into a single dashboard. Currently it supports bar charts, pivot table and cohorts.
This is the first release, which is more than usable but still has its rough edges and way to go to fulfill its full potential. The Query Editor part is quite solid, but the visualizations need more work to enrich them and to make them more user friendly.
Due to Heroku dev plan limits, it has a small database of flights (see schema [here](http://rd-demo.herokuapp.com/dashboard/schema)). Also due to another Heroku limitation, it is running with the regular user, hence you can DELETE or INSERT data/tables. Please be nice and don't do this.
PostgreSQL is used both as the operatinal database for the system, but also as the data store that is being queried. To be exact, we built this system to use on top of Amazon's Redshift, which supports the PG driver. But it's quite simple to add support for other datastores, and we do plan to do so.
This is our first large scale AngularJS project, and we learned a lot during the development of it. There are still things we need to iron out, and comments on the way we use AngularJS are more than welcome (and pull requests just as well).
### HighCharts
HighCharts is really great, but it's not free for commercial use. Please refer to their [licensing options](http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html), to see what applies for your use.
It's very likely that in the future we will switch to [D3.js](http://d3js.org/) instead.
- Ability to generate multiple visualizations for a single query (dataset) in a more flexible way than today. Also easier extensbility points to add additional visualizations.
- Dashboard filters: ability to filter/slice the data you see in a single dashboard using filters (date or selectors).
