Save yourself a few hours a week, use Sigma instead of command line DB queries.
September 19, 2019
Save yourself a few hours a week, use Sigma instead of command line DB queries.

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing
We use Sigma Computing as one of a set of data tools for analyzing customer behavior. I maintain it as a marketing tool, but also build our dashboards for other departments, such as product developers, and biz dev.
The big win for me with Sigma Computing, is that it allows me to take a set of queries that I would normally run by hand once a week, or once a month, and lets me view the data almost instantly without having to pull and manipulate it. I set up my queries one time, perform any translation or added layers I need (which Sigma is great at, stuff I can't do in Excel or anywhere else automatically) and then push them to a dashboard that I can load each morning.
The big win for me with Sigma Computing, is that it allows me to take a set of queries that I would normally run by hand once a week, or once a month, and lets me view the data almost instantly without having to pull and manipulate it. I set up my queries one time, perform any translation or added layers I need (which Sigma is great at, stuff I can't do in Excel or anywhere else automatically) and then push them to a dashboard that I can load each morning.
Pros
- Allows a quick look at important data that moves every day.
- Frees up a lot of my time from manually running, downloading, loading, and translating data.
- Allows me to easily share my findings with a quick link.
Cons
- I would love to see some additional visualizations added. I find myself using the same 2 or 3 on all of my dashboards, which is functional, but I would like some choices to make things a little more visually appealing.
- I would like to adjust the timeout options I have when querying the data. It would be nice to force a longer timeout for some of the tables I have that are larger and take a while to get data from.
- Scheduling dashboards to send snapshots to Slack fail more often than they work. It is a feature I do not use much, because I cannot rely on it.
- The ability to set the screen size of the VM that takes the snapshots would be useful. I have a high resolution screen that I set my dashboards up to be visible on, and when I get a report emailed to me, it is always cut off because the resolution on the VM that takes the snapshot is much lower.
- Sigma saves me at least an hour a day on my normal daily upkeep reporting, and at least 6 hours on my monthly reports. It easily pays for itself in the time I am not spent doing manual repetitive tasks that I used to do.
In truth, we use all of these other tools, as they provide different ways of looking at the data. The big think that Sigma allows me to do is to not spend so much time with my head inside a SQL terminal, poking around in the dark looking for answers, or trying to remember how my hundreds of DBs relate to each other. I find that it is a complimentary tool to most others that we use.
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