Self-serve BI always keeps breaking down at the same point
We keep running into a specific failure repeatedly and hence this post. I'm trying to figure out if it's just us or if others have this problem too.
We work on operations of large vehicle fleets. Our business users (ops managers) can get answers fine when the data is in one place, but the moment a question needs two systems — say, joining something from a database of vehicle arrivals, departure, with data from a third-party API or a CRM — they hit a wall.
Either they wait for the data team to write a one-off query, or someone starts exporting stuff to CSV files and starts stitching it together in Excel.
We've tried Metabase (single-database only, no cross-source joins) and pointing people at Looker requires a data engineer to update the LookML every time the question changes. What does this look like at your company?
- How often do requests like this come in, and what's the turnaround time?
- Have you found anything that lets a non-SQL person query across more than one live / data source without engineering involved?
- Or is the answer just "centralize everything into a warehouse first" — and if so, was it worth the project cost?