Scraping business intelligence

At Hackaday, we love doing things both from scratch and in Scratch, Scratch being the blocks that build useful language for teaching children and others how to program. However, when you have a large amount of data that needs to be processed, queried, and gathered to get meaningful insights, it's a pain to rewrite an SQL query every time a new question arises and needs an answer. So maybe a more elegant approach would be to give the people asking the questions the tools to answer them, but rather than teaching them SQL, Mongo, GraphQL or any other database, give them the tools to scratch the answers themselves.

That's enough puns for an article. [Tommy] came across this situation in 2011 and recently wrote about it. Scratch was released in 2003 and has inspired several projects, such as Google's Blocky. [Tommy] used Blocky to create a web application where users could drag and drop different blocks to form queries. These layouts were passed to a PHP (although later HVVM for performance reasons) and executed in SQL.

Eventually big data came along and the company hired real data scientists. Although [Tommy] notes that some of those who used his tool later learned good SQL and did it themselves. Applying the concepts of programs designed to teach programming to children might seem a bit strange from a business perspective, but we love seeing projects that help someone become curious enough to look inside the machine.