Business Intelligence, sometimes referred to as BI, is a suite of tools that allow you to build and share reports, charts, and dashboard for reporting. Looker, Tableau, and Sigma Computing are popular BI tools. These tools connect to your data warehouse and allow you to build visualizations on top of your data. At Preql, we integrate with your favorite BI tools, so you can build and manage your metrics in Preql and visualize them in the tool of your choice.

Data can be super messy and difficult to interpret. The values of certain columns can have strange formats, data can be missing, or things that are supposed to be dates are stored as text. All of these issues require a bit of clean up work before your data is trustworthy enough to report on. At Preql, we handle basic data cleaning for you, and then allow you to further customize your data and metrics.

One of the hardest parts of building trusted reporting is getting everyone to agree and understand how metrics are defined. Data dictionaries are ways of storing and socializing metric definitions. Definitions may include things like what source data they refer to, what the metric includes or excludes, or any additional business context. Preql is your one stop shop for managing metric definitions, which means your data dictionary will always be up to date and comprehensive.

At a certain point in your data journey, you’ll want to implement some guardrails around who can access, manage, or consume certain types of data. At Preql, we help you control access and management of data definitions and reporting from the very beginning.

All of the tools you use generate and store data (think Salesforce, Stripe, or your own application). Data ingestion is the process of copying your data from wherever it originates and moving it to somewhere central. You might have heard of tools like Fivetran or Airbyte which essentially replicate data from different sources and bring it into your data warehouse on a schedule.

Most organizations get to the point where they want to combine all of their data sources in one place for reporting and analysis. Typically this is a cloud data warehouse, such as Snowflake or Bigquery. With a tool like Snowflake, you can ingest data from your key sources and store it in a warehouse in a relatively cost-effective and scalable way.

Once your key data is stored in the warehouse, the hard work begins! Data transformation is the process of cleaning, combining, and structuring your data for analysis. This is typically the trickiest, most time-intensive part of the data workflow because it requires advanced data skills and a depth of understanding of the business. Unless you have Preql, which makes it a breeze!

Dimensions are attributes of metrics. For example, Product Type could be an attribute of the metric MRR. You could construct a report that looks at MRR per product type to see how your revenue is split across different product offerings. In the same way we allow you to customize metrics, Preql allows you to define dimensions according to your unique business logic.

ETL refers to the whole process of getting data from your source systems and into a usable structure. It stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. Now the new paradigm is Extract, Load, and then Transform your data, meaning you can clean and restructure your data after it’s landed in your warehouse. That said, these days people often use the terms ELT and ETL fairly interchangeably!

When you’re building a metric or a report, there’s often a subset of data you want to exclude. For example, you might want to exclude canceled orders or test accounts from your metrics. Preql allows you to specify the types of filters you want to add so we only include the data you care about when we calculate your metrics.

Simply put, metrics are things you want to measure! At Preql, we think we have a pretty good sense for what you want to measure and how you might want to measure it. That said, you’re the experts in your business, not us, which is why we allow you to modify the metrics we provide or even create fully custom metrics.