Sigma

Pluspunten: The speed with which I'm able to pull together disparate data and generate some useful insights. The Dashboard functionality has been particularly useful in creating reporting our teams can use with customers and prospects.

Minpunten: Version management and permissions. It's hard to keep everyone looking at the same version of a document, to view data, a document is created and generically named, so our folder system is getting very full and hard to navigate. Additionally, there's no way to tell if another user will be able to see a given document without asking them to try viewing it, and there's no way for them to request view access to that document.

Opmerkingen: I think is a nice tool, is easy to use and it's fast. You can load your data and start analyzing it very fast, also, it's a nice tool for non technical users, but when I need more features or power I rather to use Data Studio

Pluspunten: Is an easy to use software, I liked that it's very fast, I don't have to wait to start seeing the data

Minpunten: It needs more features, specially to migrate the worksheets to different environments, also it has a very limited number of functions. Sometimes the error messages are not very descriptives, so we can't know what's happening or how to solve it (we had a worksheet with an error like: "the joins are not efficient", something like that, so that message was kind of useless)

Opmerkingen: It has been great. The tool fit very naturally into my companies data flow and getting _explorable_ data into stakeholders hands. We also have a more static dashboarding tool that excels at that, but is weak for exploration.
Sigma also makes my job as an analyst easier by making data sets explorable using point-n-click tools vs code

Pluspunten: Makes 'easy' queries very easy to work on and see results visually immediately. Natural way to think about grouping objects but still showing the 'row' level data is amazing and a huge selling point on getting non data people to use the sheets shared with them.
Makes the mental structuring of large undertakings choppable into smaller to-do's and then joining sheets together

Minpunten: Expanding on my point in my pro's about chunking down large undertakings to smaller conceptual efforts per sheet.... this is not very performant. I have two projects where I create a base sheet and then have 2-6 sheets built off of it before potentially joining them back together to combine the aspects I've added. This however, results in the base sheet/query being run numerous times and is often times a time consuming query to begin with. In a code based environment this could be made more performant by using a WITH statement so it only has to execute once and can then be used multiple times Joins have to be exact matches (no date comparison) and can only be on original columns from the data source. Therefore, if a column must be switched from integer to string, you have to create a reference to the sheet before being able to join to other tables.

Opmerkingen: Stellar overall experience. The Sigma team makes a massive effort to truly understand and design around customer needs and use cases, as well as to provide hands-down the best customer support and training I have ever received from a B2B vendor, period.

Pluspunten: The ability to connect to any data number of data sources across our enterprise data warehouse to extract useful insights for my team. Without a line of coding I can report, analyze, and visualize data from our CRM, IoT data streams, 3rd party APIs, and now .csv uploads. The full access is balanced by perfect row-level security controls so I can use the same system to power data dashboards and portals for internal teams as I do for external clients.

Minpunten: The upside of being able to access ALL data streams leads to a downside -- it can take a long time to process and load information. However I look forward to data materialization features in the works which will eliminate this problem.

Opmerkingen: The most significant impact of Sigma has been exposing data to so many people around the business who would otherwise have had to go through the data team bottleneck, both slowing their access to data and limiting the explorability and agility of the results. However, this can be accomplished in a controlled manner with Sigma, ensuring that stakeholders only have access to vetted sources of truth procured by the data team.

Pluspunten: - ability to explore and inspect the source data and perform sophisticated SQL functions via GUI (group, join, aggregate, etc.)
- ability to create single source of truth worksheets and build all related content off of that, instead of reinventing the wheel with every new query
- unlimited reader accounts allows usage to really take off and flourish instead of hamstringing itself

Minpunten: - pricing still unclear as to what constitutes an author vs a reader - based on recent conversations with Sigma I'm afraid that we are going to be upcharged on items that were never made clear to us (I am still unclear)
- new software still has its share of bugs