The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Modern Analytics Using Common Paradigms, Featuring Rob Woollen & Stipo Josipovic of Sigma

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Rob Woollen & Stipo Josipovic of Sigma.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. Well, Kostas, what a fascinating conversation with Stipo and Rob from Sigma. They have built a modern analytics tool that is a spreadsheet and SQL interface. So relying on the two most common paradigms for modern analytics.

And it was fascinating to hear them talk about how and why they made the decision to pursue that kind of interface. I think two things stuck out to me. One, they didn't start there. That seems like an obvious, you know, it seems like an obvious decision. Well, let's just, you know, bridge this gap between the spreadsheets and SQL, which have the most usage in terms of analytical interfaces than any other tooling in the world,

but they didn't actually start there. Rob, as a founder, told us that they went through many iterations and did a ton of research, watched tons and tons of analysts use a bunch of different tools, and ultimately came to that conclusion. That to me was fascinating. The other piece that I really appreciated was they really had kind of a humble nature to them

in terms of the way that they described coming to their conclusions about the product. And I think Rob made a great point in that a lot of analytics tools are pretty opinionated because they maybe think that they need to create a lot of guardrails for the end users because they sort of know how analytics need to be done better than the end user. And Rob was pretty clear that's not actually true. And that he seems to have a fundamental belief that that's a pretty bad way to build products in general. And, you know, from their success, it's clear that I think they made the

right choice and sort of, you know, giving different kinds of advanced tooling to different users. So I loved it. It was an absolutely great episode. Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, there are a couple of things that I found very fascinating. It was a wealth of, let's say, wisdom there from some people with like a ton of experience in the industry. I really enjoyed like the part where we talked about the differences between the

relational model and the spreadsheets and how these can be bridged. What does this mean in terms of the product that you're building, in terms of the experience that you tried to build there? And there were some very interesting insights there. But also from a technical perspective, what it takes to engineer a system like that, which is also super super super interesting and gives like like helps us like understand of like the difficulty and the complexity of the problem that we are dealing with and

at the same time it's like very interesting to hear that it is a journey like you never like solving a problem is always like a journey and like that's what I really keep from this conversation with both Stipo and Rob. We have done so far

an amazing job. I would say they've done an amazing job. They didn't say the word amazing because they are very humble, but Sigma is an amazing tool in terms of the experience that it delivers at the end. Rob was very explicit on that.

There's still like a lot of work to be done there and many things that like can be improved. And the other thing that I'd say, and I'm not going to disclose exactly what, because I want to keep that as like a surprise, like for our audience is that there's also like a hidden gem in this conversation about go to market and building products and companies especially when you are going out there to compete against some very established and big companies. So I would recommend to anyone like to pay attention.

There are like some very interesting parts of the conversation, not only from the technical and the product perspective, but also the business perspective. I agree. All right. Well, thank you for listening.

Another great episode in the books. Subscribe if you haven't on your favorite podcast platform and tell a friend if you haven't. We always love getting new listeners. And of course, give us feedback. You can go to the website, submit the form, tell us what you like, what you don't, and we will catch you on the next one.