#OpenSourceDiscovery 89: Evidence

Generate reports using SQL and markdown

Today I discovered…

Evidence

Evidence is a code-based alternative to drag-and-drop business intelligence (BI) tools. It creates a website from markdown files by running SQL statements and making charts from the results.

💖 What I like about Evidence:

• Rich charting capabilities - has all the charts I wanted including calendar heatmap and sankey

• Rich ui components and interactivity (filters, search, comparison, etc.)

• It caches the data beforehand, so no huge cost even if it is accessed for million times. Perfect for data journalism use case (where the audience is public)

• Good aesthetics - minimalistic and visually appealing

• Can be used to bring together vizualization in the same repo as dbt project for materialization

👎 What I dislike about Evidence:

• It runs query beforehand and caches it, even if you need it infrequently for internal usage

• Overall, it feels like a missing feature in dbt. While using it along with dbt, seems like redoing stuff (the query/transformation) which was done to certain extent already in dbt.

• A slight learning curve (not so much but it didn’t have to be this much either)

• Cannot be hosted on GitHub pages directly, would have been more appealing if it were

⭐ Ratings and metrics

Based on my experience, I would rate this project as following

• Production readiness: 7/10

• Docs rating: 6/10

• Time to POC(proof of concept): less than a week

Author: Brian D, Sean, Archie Sarre Wood, Adam, and Evidence team

Demo | Source

Tech Stack: JavaScript, Svelte, Node.js

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