HACKER Q&A
📣 kjhitcher

Is there market for self-host, customizable web UI for Google BigQuery?


Hi HNers,

I’m trying to build an open-source, self-hosted, easy-to-customize web UI for Google BigQuery. Do you find it a product that you would like to use? Discussion on features are also very welcome.

The product is to solve some problems I experienced when using Google BigQuery:

(1) Cost saving. There are quite a few common, well-known “best practices” that a self-hosted web UI can easily enforce to save cost, for example discourage users from using “SELECT *” [1]. But to me it would be hard to imagine Google actually adds this feature to their own BigQuery UI, since they are getting paid when users don't follow the "best practices".

(2) Allow users to add links to the UI. For example, I think many companies would like to add links of internal guidelines on how to use BigQuery and how to find datasets.

(3) Keyboard shortcuts. There are a lot of shortcuts I would like to add in BigQuery, such as "focus on result sheet", or "open query history".

Do you think it's an idea worth spending time on? Feedback is very appreciated.

Thanks!

[1] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/best-practices-costs


  👤 mattbillenstein Accepted Answer ✓
I'm not sure - the existing web ui is decent enough and simple -- more advanced users may end up in something with charting anyway - metabase, tableau, etc.

And in the mind of a lot of people now - self-hosted is more of an annoyance than a win if you don't have a hosted version of the app...


👤 sails
Snowflake is working on Snowsight, in public preview. I suppose what you are describing is a more refined query layer, which is somewhere between Snowsight and Metabase

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/ui-snowsight.html