Item: Sisense for Cloud Data Teams
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Periscope as our primary tool for insights to prepare our business leaders for strategic decisions. The ability to quickly stand up new dashboards or edit existing queries allows my small team of analysts to empower over 400 colleagues without bogging down the team in multiple coding languages.

Pros and Cons

Write query, get chart. Fast iteration.
Responsive support and product teams keep us current on product roadmap and enhancements.
Minimal onboarding required for new team members. Analysts don't need to learn a new language to begin development, just the appropriate flavor of SQL.
Caching simplifies ETL, mitigating dependency on data engineering for basic use-cases.

More controls around database settings and SQL views would enable more customized workflows.
Git integration would be amazing (I'm told this is coming soon)

Return on Investment

An aggressive caching strategy enabled multiple cross database joins which sped up our development cycle by 6-12 months.
All SQL, only SQL, accelerated the growth rate of junior analysts

Alternatives Considered

Looker and Tableau Desktop

LookML was able to simplify development of views involving window calculations, but slowed down the overall development cycle as minor SQL edits required heavy code reviews.

Tableau has great interactive options but has proved non-performant with our database mix (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redshift).

Other Software Used

MySQL, Amazon Redshift, Tableau Desktop

Likelihood to Recommend

Pick Periscope for an environment where analysts are fluent in SQL and business users want to explore charts and self-service data downloads.

Business users who want to explore for insights themselves but don't want to learn SQL may have some difficulty without training.

BI Analyst's Secret Weapon

Overall Satisfaction with Periscope Data