Sigma has eliminated the common barriers to entry for our data--the door has been opened for those that have never heard of SQL
Updated September 23, 2020
Sigma has eliminated the common barriers to entry for our data--the door has been opened for those that have never heard of SQL
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing
Simga Computing is used by the entirety of the data analytics team, as well as a few select individuals like myself, that need to perform data analysis. I believe the plan is for more of a company-wide implementation to be adopted, but outside of engineering, operations, and data analytics, the audience/value will be limited.
Sigma's cloud-based platform offers the benefit of quickly querying large amounts of data, those that would never be able to be effectively run in Excel/Google Sheets. Furthermore, it expands the 'proficient data consumer' population across the company, as SQL (or other query language) skills are not required.
Sigma's cloud-based platform offers the benefit of quickly querying large amounts of data, those that would never be able to be effectively run in Excel/Google Sheets. Furthermore, it expands the 'proficient data consumer' population across the company, as SQL (or other query language) skills are not required.
- Quickly querying vast amounts of data - this cloud-based solution integrates seamlessly with our Snowflake aggregator.
- It increases the population of employees that can effectively utilize data. Knowledge of query languages are not necessary, but I love that Sigma still offers the option of using query languages (particularly for those that are more familiar with them and/or highly complex queries.
- Seamless integration wit Snowflake enables quick implementation of the tool.
- When adding values to include/exclude in a filter, it's not obviously that clicking away from the field entry will initiate the application of the filter.
- In the filter dropdown menu, it's not entirely obvious how to remove a filter. The "x" is not easy to find visually, nor is its intent obvious.
- Simga greatly increased the population of colleagues that could effectively access and query data--I'd estimate that it's grown our effective-data users by 30-40% company-wide.
- As with any business tool, integration and mass-adoption take time. We are a data-centric consumer hardware company, there are a myriad of existing tools so getting full buy-in (outside of our data analytics team) has taken >1 year.
This is what I would describe as the primary benefit to using Sigma at our company -- the world of data analysis has opened up beyond those that have spent years formally studying and/or working with data. An understanding of SQL is certainly helpful but not at all necessary to benefit from Sigma. We have a number of users from the design and marketing teams, they were previously dependent on the data analytics team, but have been able to greatly reduce the number of requests simply due to our implementation of Sigma.
I've personally seen a benefit from the two workspaces: 'individual' allows me to sandbox new analysis/reporting structures, and the ability to instantaneously publish this to a shared folder (which is limited to any/all that have access to the folder), is fantastic. Furthermore, the ease of creating dashboards and sharing them as quick executive summaries cannot be overlooked.
Use of terminal commands and SQL knowledge was previously a barrier of entry to our company's data. Outside of our dedicated data team(s), significant amounts of data required a ticket to be filed, completed and delivered to the intended audience which then needed to weed through the information. Now, Sigma can perform the same queries extremely quickly. In ≈1 year of use, I've only seen it timeout 2-3 times across the entire organization.
This model as allowed for efficient use of company resources. Those that are data specialists are able to maximize use of the tool/advanced reporting, and those that simply need to view the results aren't left in the dark. The beneficial combination of a responsive analysis tool combined with the ability to share the analysis across our organization cannot be over-stressed.
While the business decision to acquire and implement Sigma was not mine, it's benefits in speed, stability and user-friendliness (with some caveats as previously noted) make it an easy choice over similar products. I feel that the largest disadvantage to Sigma is the somewhat-difficult-to-navigate UI, due to the color palette.