Interesting development for a lot of the in-database visualization players (Chart.io, Looker, RJMetrics etc) - a lot of the older and weaker players have depended on lock-in and inertia to keep them around; this squarely puts them in a bake-off similar to what's happening in the hosted analytics / customer communication space.

I, for one, welcome our new database overlords.

Segment integration has driven more refugees from other analytics platforms than a lot of other channels

More competition in this space is better - let's compete on value for our customers, not lock-in and hostage-taking.

I totally agree, columnar databases have rendered "traditional" BI tool irrelevant and required the analysis and visualization layer to adapt to billions of records accessible via SQL.

We (EverythingMe) open sourced our own internal data visualization and collaboration tool which is used with our own Redshift setup - https://github.com/EverythingMe/redash

I see your point, but what you are saying is very extreme.

Look no further than Tableau's valuation. The "traditional" BI market is still huge, and if anything, direct SQL-level access benefits a small portion of the entire BI user universe.

I might have taken it to the extreme (always a good discussion kick-starter), but aamof we did try Tableau an a range of other tools, and being a startup that uses data and most if not all of its people are OK with SQL we managed to be a lot more productive and transparent with re:dash.

There's a blog post about the motivations behind building it here - http://geeks.everything.me/2013/12/05/introducing_redash/

We love what Segment is working on. It's a big step towards different companies sharing a common schema, which means that analysis built on that schema can be portable across companies, and doesn't have to be redone by everyone. To that end, we partnered with Segment by released a series of open-source queries and visualizations that work for any Segment customer (or anyone with a similar schema): http://about.modeanalytics.com/playbook/

A few more details about how it works and our new partners here: https://segment.com/redshift

"For the first time ever, you can go all the way from user tracking on your webpage or mobile app to an enterprise-grade, SQL data warehouse with just a single line of code"

You've been able to do this with Treasure Data for months now, and we're schemaless. (Full disclosure, I work there and was the one that built the JavaScript SDK.)

We're very happy to be partnering with Segment for Segment SQL - it saves our Redshift customers a lot of work.

Just an FYI - we’re offering a 30 day free trial for Segment customers. Just sign up here: http://www.periscope.io/#signup

Was just telling someone yesterday how SQL is eating the world. Good job guys!

We have put multiple man months into the same effort - data and BI integration into Redshift for all the data visualizations, etc. This is truly is promising.