Periscope Data Blog

Hey Zack, it’s probably a good idea to disclose that you work at Looker if you’re going to talk about them on HN. https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=145490726

I run marketing for Periscope. Like Chartio, you guys have a great product. We routinely send people your way when they have more business user needs and aren’t a good fit for Periscope.

For those evaluating tools like Periscope/Looker/Chartio:

Whereas Looker focuses on business users, we’ve built Periscope around serving SQL analysts better than anyone else.

If you don't have someone who knows SQL on your team, Looker (or Chartio) is probably a better fit. (though I should mention that some customers have learned SQL through our customer support :)

We’re focused on the SQL analysts who are building dashboards and running reports, day in, day out. With that said, every one of our customers has employees who don’t know SQL, but need to dive into their data. So we’ve built a ton of features to make this easy as well.

If you want to find out more, visit https://www.periscope.io. If Periscope looks like a good fit, sign up and we'll get you set up with a free trial.

This looks very cool. My company (http://periscope.io) is just now getting to the point of putting documentation online, and -- surprise! -- it's a huge pain and products in this space all seem mediocre.

One deal-breaker for me is that it has to feel like it's on my website. This means templates are not enough: I need full CSS customizability (statuspage.io does a good job with this) or iframe ability. The lack of a great, fully customizable product in this space is why I am currently fucking around with Markdown pages.

It's certainly fair to charge a lot more than you're apparently charging in order to get this customizability -- needing it probably predicts a real business that cares about its brand. (If knol.io becomes a big business I bet you'll end up charging a lot more in general.)

Anyway, awesome job with this! Looks like a great product solving a real problem.

I've seen a surprising amount of companies with a stack of Java/Linux for the application and SQL Server/Windows for the database. Just look at Indeed.com's job posting if you don't believe me[1]. If SQL Server was on Linux, they'd switch in a minute.

RDBMSes that you pay for are still able to out perform free, community-developed systems [2]. I've done work on both the DBA and the developer side on Postgres, MySQL, and SQL Server, and I can tell you that if platform and cost were never an issue, I'd choose the latter every time.

[1] http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Java+SQL+Server
[2] https://www.periscope.io/blog/count-distinct-in-mysql-postgres-sql-server-and-oracle.html

Periscope | San Francisco, ONSITE | Customer Support Specialist (SQL), Full Stack Engineer (Ruby, Go, CoffeeScript, Java) | https://www.periscope.io/

We make SQL data analysis really fast! Our customers build and share dashboards around their companies after querying tens of billions of rows in seconds.

Our best feature is the way we support our customers. Many of them have said that our chat support is "the best customer support they've ever had".

If you are excited to join our team of 10 and help continue this awesome tradition, we'd love to meet you!

Email us at hello@periscope.io

The companies:

Pericope: http://www.periscope.io/

FreedomCP: http://www.freedomcp.com/

Kinnek: http://www.kinnek.com/

Boomtrain: http://www.boomtrain.com/

Tray: http://www.tray.io/

Circl: http://www.joincircl.com/

ScaleGrid: http://www.scalegrid.net/

Buyou: http://www.buyouapp.com/

cisimple: http://www.cisimple.com

Shop2: http://www.shop2.com/

UpCounsel: http://www.upcounsel.com/

Storefront: http://www.storefront.is/