blazer

Blazer

Explore your data. Easily create charts and dashboards, and share the results with your team.

Try it out

:tangerine: Battle-tested at Instacart

Blazer 1.0 was recently released! See the instructions for upgrading

Features

• Works with PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redshift
• Charts - visualize the data
• Dashboards - see queries all in one place
• Checks & Alerts - get emailed when bad data appears [master]
• Variables - run the same queries with different values
• Audits - all queries are tracked
• Secure - works with your authentication system

Variables

[demo]

Create queries with variables

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE gender = {gender}

Smart Variables

[demo]

Supposed you have this query

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE city_id = {city_id}

Instead of remembering each city’s id, users can select cities by name.

Add a smart variable with:

smart_variables:
  city_id: "SELECT id, name FROM cities ORDER BY name ASC"

The first column is the value of the variable, and the second column is the label.

Results

Linked Columns

[demo]

Link results to other pages in your apps or around the web. Specify a column name and where it should link to. You can use the value of the result with {value}.

linked_columns:
  user_id: "/admin/users/{value}"
  ip_address: "http://www.infosniper.net/index.php?ip_address={value}"

Smart Columns

[demo]

SELECT name, city_id FROM users

See which city the user belongs to without a join.

smart_columns:
  city_id: "SELECT id, name FROM cities WHERE id IN {value}"

Charts

Blazer will automatically generate charts based on the types of the columns returned in your query.

Line Chart

There are two ways to generate line charts.

2+ columns - timestamp, numeric(s) [demo]

SELECT gd_week(created_at), COUNT(*) FROM users GROUP BY 1

3 columns - timestamp, string, numeric [demo]

SELECT gd_week(created_at), gender, AVG(age) FROM users GROUP BY 1, 2

Pie Chart

2 columns - string, numeric [demo]

SELECT gender, COUNT(*) FROM users GROUP BY 1

Audits

Each query run creates a Blazer::Audit.

Dashboards

[demo]

Combine multiple queries into a dashboard.

If the query has a chart, the chart is shown. Otherwise, you’ll see a table.

If any queries have variables, they will show up on the dashboard.

Checks

[demo]

Checks give you a centralized place to see the health of your data.

Create a query to identify bad rows.

SELECT * FROM events WHERE started_at > ended_at

Then create check with optional emails if you want to be notified.

Installation

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'blazer'

Run:

rails g blazer:install
rake db:migrate

And mount the dashboard in your config/routes.rb:

mount Blazer::Engine, at: "blazer"

For production, specify your database:

ENV["BLAZER_DATABASE_URL"] = "postgres://user:password@hostname:5432/database"

Blazer tries to protect against queries which modify data (by running each query in a transaction and rolling it back), but a safer approach is to use a read only user. See how to create one.

Checks (optional)

Be sure to set a host in config/environments/production.rb for emails to work.

config.action_mailer.default_url_options = {host: "blazerme.herokuapp.com"}

Schedule checks to run every hour (with cron, Heroku Scheduler, etc).

rake blazer:run_checks

You can also set up failing checks to be sent once a day (or whatever you prefer).

rake blazer:send_failing_checks

Permissions

PostgreSQL

Create a user with read only permissions:

BEGIN;
CREATE ROLE blazer LOGIN PASSWORD 'secret123';
GRANT CONNECT ON DATABASE database_name TO blazer;
GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA public TO blazer;
GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO blazer;
ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES IN SCHEMA public GRANT SELECT ON TABLES TO blazer;
COMMIT;

MySQL

Create a user with read only permissions:

GRANT SELECT, SHOW VIEW ON database_name.* TO blazer@’127.0.0.1′ IDENTIFIED BY ‘secret123‘;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Sensitive Data

To protect sensitive info like password hashes and access tokens, use views. Documentation coming soon.

Authentication

Don’t forget to protect the dashboard in production.

Basic Authentication

Set the following variables in your environment or an initializer.

ENV["BLAZER_USERNAME"] = "andrew"
ENV["BLAZER_PASSWORD"] = "secret"

Devise

authenticate :user, lambda { |user| user.admin? } do
  mount Blazer::Engine, at: "blazer"
end

Useful Tools

For an easy way to group by day, week, month, and more with correct time zones, check out Groupdate.

Redshift

Add activerecord4-redshift-adapter to your Gemfile and set:

ENV["BLAZER_DATABASE_URL"] = "redshift://user:password@hostname:5439/database"

Upgrading

1.0

Blazer 1.0 brings a number of new features:

• multiple data sources, including Redshift
• dashboards
• checks

To upgrade, run

bundle update blazer

Create a migration

rails g migration upgrade_blazer_to_1_0

with

add_column :blazer_queries, :data_source, :string
add_column :blazer_audits, :data_source, :string

create_table :blazer_dashboards do |t|
  t.text :name
  t.timestamps
end

create_table :blazer_dashboard_queries do |t|
  t.references :dashboard
  t.references :query
  t.integer :position
  t.timestamps
end

create_table :blazer_checks do |t|
  t.references :query
  t.string :state
  t.text :emails
  t.timestamps
end

And run

rake db:migrate

Update config/blazer.yml with

# see https://github.com/ankane/blazer for more info

# data sources
data_sources:
  main:
    url: <%%= ENV["BLAZER_DATABASE_URL"] %>

    timeout: 15

    smart_variables:
      # zone_id: "SELECT id, name FROM zones ORDER BY name ASC"

    linked_columns:
      # user_id: "/admin/users/{value}"

    smart_columns:
      # user_id: "SELECT id, name FROM users WHERE id IN {value}"

# create audits
audit: true

# change the time zone
# time_zone: "Pacific Time (US & Canada)"

# class name of the user model
# user_class: User

# method name for the user model
# user_name: name

TODO

• advanced permissions
• standalone version
• better navigation

History

View the changelog

Thanks

Blazer uses a number of awesome, open source projects.

• Rails
• jQuery
• Bootstrap
• Selectize
• List.js
• StickyTableHeaders
• Stupid jQuery Table Sort
• Date Range Picker

Created by ankane and righi

Demo data from MovieLens.

Contributing

Everyone is encouraged to help improve this project. Here are a few ways you can help:

• Report bugs
• Fix bugs and submit pull requests
• Write, clarify, or fix documentation
• Suggest or add new features