There’s been a lot of action and consolidation in the data analytics space recently (Looker to Google and Tableau to Salesforce to name a couple major ones). But there’s also been a ton of action in the open source space, and we think everyone should be taking notice and celebrating the progress. We certainly are.
Yesterday, Meltano released their 1.0 version. It’s a big milestone for a project we’ve been monitoring for some time. In the same way Linux stormed the operating systems scene in the 90s and lowered the cost for consumers and businesses to access powerful OS features, we see the same pattern playing out in the analytics space. Meltano just took a major step forward on that journey.
We’re excited about it for a variety of reasons. To start, it’s backed by a great company (GitLab) and team (led by Danielle Morrill). The project also combines a variety of other high caliber open source data tools such as dbt and Singer.io. Meltano has done the work to combine these separate products into a combined solution that can take on the bigger proprietary players.
While there are other open source visualization tools like Redash and Metabase (both solid), Meltano is attempting to be a single tool for the entire data ops workflow. From Extract to Load to Transform to Model to Visualization/Dashboarding. Doing all these steps well, often requires expensive proprietary technology or a highly technical internal team. If Meltano is able to truly deliver, it will be a game changer.
The architecture makes sense. While companies can choose to use SQLite or Postgres to get started quickly, Snowflake is also supported which is pretty much a requirement for any new data product hitting the market today. They’ll add additional data warehouse over time. Using Meltano on top of Snowflake makes a ton of sense because you can push all the transformations and computations down the warehouse and simply use Meltano to orchestrate your pipeline.
Like GitLab, Meltano will be Open Core. Right now it’s fully open source, but expect them to eventually have paid premium features.
GitLab is open core and Meltano will be open core but is completely open source now. Also, we aspire to become a public company November 18, 2020 as listed on our strategy page.
— Sid Sijbrandij (@sytses) June 6, 2019
The version 1 product is early, but it’s an exciting start.
If you are interested in giving Meltano a spin you check it out here. We’re also happy to help, so drop a note to hello@hashpath.com if you’d like some help getting going with Meltano.