Sigma Computing mostly solves a very difficult problem with a few notable shortcomings
October 01, 2019
Sigma Computing mostly solves a very difficult problem with a few notable shortcomings
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing
We're using Sigma Computing in parallel with other reporting tools to allow business users to define and modify reports without having to learn SQL or submit a ticket to an analyst who does. It's used across the organization but has not been fully adopted yet.
- Sigma displays tabular data and particularly pivot tables very well. The formatting options are very flexible and fairly intuitive.
- Sigma's mechanism for defining and using filters in reports and dashboards is very far behind their competitors. Filter behavior is often inefficient and counterintuitive.
- The queries Sigma generates for non-trivial operations seems to be relatively inefficient, and it makes extensive use of machine-generated column identifiers that make it difficult to diagnose which parts of the query are causing trouble.
- We have only completed a full rollout of a small number of reports but in these cases the results have been a significant reduction in manual work to compile and format data in spreadsheets. The cost of the system and development time involved with delivering reports to end users are relatively small.
We have a report that was previously handled by copying data from a source system and inserting it manually into a spreadsheet every day. We were able to replace this with a spreadsheet-style interface into the live data that eliminates the manual work and allows business users to modify or rearrange the results using the Sigma interface without having to deal with pasting in new data.
We have separate workspaces for different teams to store completed reports and a central workspace with base worksheets that can be used to generate new reports. Generally our collaborative efforts have not made specific use of the workspaces -- people who need to collaborate have access to reports across workspaces.
We have generally not found this to be true.
We have relatively few people writing reports and relatively many people consuming them, so this pricing model does match our use case well. We have had trouble with other systems where we would like an equivalent pricing model but end up paying for many full licenses that are not utilized fully.
This list of comparison products does not have the necessary options for me to describe the actual evaluation we did.