Phiona: No-code data automation- integrate, wrangle and sync data 💫

Will Gendron

As a Parabola power user, what are your differences or advantages that would make me want to switch?

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4yr ago

Steve West

Phiona

Maker

@william_gendron We're a bit different than Parabola in a few ways: First, Phiona can run as a virtual data mesh that encompasses all your online and offline datasets. This reduces the effect of data silos, because all of the underlying data you need for analysis is either housed or virtualized in one Phiona project, rather than stored in different places and scattered within connections across multiple data flows. Second, our transformation interface is a bit more exploratory in nature, in a couple of key ways. We proactively highlight areas where there may be gaps or inconsistencies in your data (which may take a long time to discover organically). Additionally, as you make the cleaning or transformation changes in the spreadsheet, we translate those changes to code. The order of operations is a bit different, so it feels a lot more like using spreadsheet functions than building coding steps. Third, Phiona is an API platform, so all of your combined/transformed datasets can be used as a database for your no-code apps or data visualization platforms. This is huge for organizations that want to build custom, secure data applications on demand without having to spin up different databases or write custom code. Over time, we'll be building out a number of application integrations and adding in much richer transformation functions, so you'll see some pretty huge advancements as we keep building on top of this version 1.0! Hope this helps.

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4yr ago

Nate Dame

@william_gendron @steve_west does this mean you are positioning Phiona as a no-code ELT (or ETL) tool AND the only data warehouse you need for no-code?

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4yr ago

Steve West

Phiona

Maker

@william_gendron @steve_west @nate_dame That's right- you can use Phiona for both! Most existing data warehouses (at least at the enterprise-level price point most indie hackers and small businesses wouldn't be interested in) don't have great options for bringing in data from apps like Airtable or Dropbox. Plus, even once the data is brought into the warehouse, there's no great way to work with the information without knowing SQL (bare minimum) or Python (if you have to do data cleaning or enrichment). We think of Phiona as a data mesh that separates the typical data access and transformation layers from the data storage layer. A data mesh makes it easy for individuals, small businesses, or even departments within larger companies to connect to data from disparate silos that makes sense for their use case, become the domain data experts as they work to build data products like reports or analyses, and share these data products to internal or external requesters via secured APIs. There's significant benefit here- if you regularly serve clients data, imagine being able to build custom, secure data products for them without writing code to build a database infrastructure for each one, or sending them spreadsheets each month. You can use Phiona to spin up a back-end database and transformation layer with just a few spreadsheets and some no-code transformation steps. That said, Phiona can also act solely as the transformation layer for automations between a data source and destination, as we currently support MySQL, Postgres, and shortly, other data warehouses too. We're pretty agnostic about where you put your data, we just want to make it easier for you to use!

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4yr ago

Steve West

Phiona

Maker

Hi PH, and thank you @chrismessina! We’re Steve and Carmine from Phiona. 👋 Phiona is a no-code data automation tool, with the goal to enable busy, non-technical professionals to create powerful data transformation workflows without having to learn SQL or Python. In our previous roles, we were frustrated at the amount of time it took to access data, manipulate it, and either create reports or sync with other systems. There’s a reason that the business world still relies on IT data dumps to spreadsheets, painstakingly manual data cleaning, and legacy macro scripts- there are few cost-effective ways for professionals to automate repetitive data tasks in the same way a developer can. With Phiona, you can build blueprints that extract and transform data from local files, online spreadsheets, and databases, and we plan to support syncing information directly to and from applications and APIs shortly. A couple of unique features- we automatically identify potential cleaning issues so that you’re spending more time fixing issues rather than finding them, and any dataset you connect to Phiona can be exposed as a private API, so you can share data with others without sharing your DB credentials or exposing proprietary transformation logic. And of course, you can automate workflows on a schedule or invoke them via webhook! Our early customers are using us to connect multiple individual classroom datasets to one global Google Sheet, migrate data nightly from Airtable to databases, and automate product utilization dashboard refreshes- we hope to see more innovative uses from folks in the future. Would love to hear what you all think- happy to answer any questions in the comments! 💰 PS: For the PH community, we’re offering a lifetime 25% off for the first 50 folks to sign up- use PHEARLYADOPTER when you upgrade your plan!

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4yr ago