The myth of self-serve BI
That story usually starts with an engineer or data scientist who's frustrated because they spend too much time writing queries and preparing dashboards. They think that if they make BI easy enough, everyone will be able to “self-serve”, but that rarely ever happens.
What actually happens is that engineers and data scientists end up being the only people using the "self-serve" BI tool, which, ironically, makes it not self-serve at all.
SQL is the only self-serve BI tool. Still, most "self-serve" BI vendors don't want to admit it, so they find ways to reinvent the wheel and disguise SQL as something else. Maybe that's what customers want to hear, or maybe they genuinely believe it, I'm not sure.
Either way, the problem with most approaches to "self-serve" BI is that they consider SQL to be the only barrier to business stakeholders querying data. This assumption is incorrect.
Stop and think about it. Let's say you could wave a magic wand and make writing SQL queries as easy as writing an email. Do you think business stakeholders would suddenly start querying data? The answer is no.
