“Poli is an easy-to-use SQL reporting application built for SQL lovers!”
Poli isn’t a fully fledged BI tool. In my experience Poli is enough for sizeable chunk of BI users. I often find alot of features in sophisticated BI tools are not used.
Poli is simple to get started. Within a couple of hours you will have a dashboard running off any JDBC compliant database. That means you can connect to just about all databases. You can use SQL to develop your reports and dashboards.
I wanted to run Poli as a service on Ubuntu 20.04. Here are the steps are followed. Instructions largely from How To Install Metabase with Systemd on Ubuntu 20.04/18.04/16.04
- Install Java
- Download latest version of Poli and unzip to a location you would like to install Poli. In my case it is
/apps/poli - Add a system group
sudo groupadd -r appmgr
- Create a system user appmgr with the default group appmgr
sudo useradd -r -s /bin/false -g appmgr appmgr
- Give the new user ownership of Poli folder
sudo chown -R appmgr:appmgr /apps/poli
- Create a systemd service unit file. I decided to use the start scripts that come with Poli to start the service.
sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/poli.service
[Unit]
Description=Poli Server
[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/apps/poli/
ExecStart=/bin/bash start.sh
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Run the following commands to reload systemd and start Poli service and check statussudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start poli.service
sudo systemctl status poli
This is output I get from status
poli.service - Poli Server
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/poli.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Wed 2020-MM-DD HH::46 SAST; 13s ago
Main PID: 43993 (bash)
Tasks: 38 (limit: 9251)
Memory: 280.2M
CGroup: /system.slice/poli.service
├─43993 /bin/bash start.sh
└─44003 java -jar poli-0.12.2.jar --spring.config.name=application,poli
Mon DD YY:18:46 server-name systemd[1]: Started Poli Server.