If you’re staying current on data visualization tools, you may have noticed a new player in the game. Sigma Computing provides a cloud-native SaaS solution with a focus on cross-organization accessibility. Sigma offers a solution comparable to other visual analytics tools like Looker, Power BI, and Tableau.

If you’re shopping for a new front-end tool and considering Sigma, there are a number of things to look for, the first being ease of use. This includes not only ease of use for the actual user, but ease of administration and setup, and the simplicity of business transactions with product owners. It is also important to consider if this product meets your business requirements and if it has the customer support and user community to guide you through the learning and onboarding process. This post focuses on the areas in which Sigma Computing is most successful and why you should consider them when it’s time for a change.

One of Sigma’s most unique features is a spreadsheet-style interface. Unlike some of its competitors, like Tableau and Power BI, this interface will be equally familiar to business users with Excel experience and an analyst accustomed to writing SQL or learning a tool-specific language. Sigma allows users to create functions, formulas, filters, sorts, and pivot tables for analyzing billions of rows of data all while building performative SQL in the background that is sent back to the data warehouse. Having this type of accessibility reduces the learning curve and improves the onboarding process. It also removes the bottleneck between your busy BI team and the end user, and still allows for instant analysis with all the power of a live cloud data warehouse connection. 

Thanks to these live cloud data warehouse connection capabilities, your Sigma instance will be running with the same speed and power as your data warehouse and is as easy as ever to connect to. You can connect to Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, or Postgres with the help of robust administration documentation. You can even rely on Sigma to take your connection abilities further by using their large partner network to complete your cloud data stack. This includes Snowflake, BigQuery, and all of AWS along with several ETL powerhouses like Matillion and Fivetran. All of which are a familiar stack for us here at Data Clymer, a Sigma consulting partner.

Sigma is building a community to support seamless integrations with the addition of our consulting team and their variety of partners. They also offer 24/7 live support, a learning library, demos, and webinars including hands-on labs. Due to its accessibility, Sigma scores very high with us on the ease-of-use scale but has even more to contribute to meet your business requirements. Sigma can be even more powerful in the hands of a consultant or engineer if you need additional functionality. Each tile in a workbook or dashboard can run on a uniquely modeled SQL query where you can join data sources from your data warehouse, external spreadsheets, or other datasets created in Sigma. Product adoption can also be accelerated based on the level of expertise used in dashboard set up and how visualizations are presented. 

So whether you’re new to visual analytics or you have a whole BI team at your disposal, Sigma has made itself highly accessible, is a proven contender in the world of front end technologies, and may be the right option for you as you continue to build your best in class data stack.


 

About Angela

Angela is a business intelligence expert who is passionate about building internal and external business relations. She obtains this through positive and effective communications and through building tools to improve data insight.