Big data: Behind the buzzword is a real business need to take massive datasets and make actionable sense of them. While professionals could equip themselves for the big data revolution by earning a master’s degree in data science, VQL, a new tool developed by local entrepreneur Jason Strauss, allows folks with no technical background to perform data analytics all on their own.
Strauss, an MIT alumnus, earned a Y Combinator Fellowship to work on VQL last fall. And now, his data analytics solution for non-technical folks is launched and equipped with an automatic data importer.
“It’s for people who have data and don’t know what to do with it,” Strauss explained to us. “It’s like Excel for much, much more data. And if Excel handled real-time data.”
According to Strauss, who had previously worked at data analytics company Palantir, the idea for VQL came about when he encountered multiple people struggling with handling the data they needed to do their jobs. In one instance, “A friend reached out. He had downloaded 200 million records of something, tried to open it in Excel and, as a result, hadn’t been able to use that computer in two days,” Strauss shared.
VQL connects to a SQL database or Relational Database Systems, such as PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift and Heroku. It can also upload data from a CSV or spreadsheet. In all cases, the solution imports the information, predicts column categories and automatically divides the data into a comprehensive table in a matter of minutes.
Users can then make instant inquiries sans code, searching for certain text, numbers and dates throughout the dataset. If they aren’t feeling the spreadsheet layout, they can also create histograms - similar to Excel, but with a lot more information.
It’s for people who have data and don’t know what to do with it.
“Over the last few years, software and data have gotten into every aspect of a business,” Strauss said. “Everyone - from recruiting and HR teams to finance departments - have their own set of data questions, but don’t know how to have them answered without involving a technical person. It’s a huge fragmented space.”
Strauss added that VQL is also promising for companies who don’t have the infrastructure for databases, such as restaurants, local governments, Amazon sellers and consulting firms - the latter of which served as VQL’s beta testers. It would give these businesses insight into simple metrics without bugging engineers.
Right now, Strauss described VQL as “ramen profitable”, adding that it was generating enough revenue from its first adopters to pay the bills. It just wrapped up adding the automatic data importer and, in the future, he hopes to incorporate automatic alerts into the solution.
