Internal Dashboards with Retool

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Retool has become a very popular tool for companies to build internal dashboards. It allows first-class connections to Postgres resources, so creating a dashboard widget for bit.io-hosted data is really easy! We'll go over how to do that today.

For the purposes of this guide, I'll be using sample sales data from Kaggle. Once I have the csv file, I drag it into bit.io and create a new repository (this can be done either on the landing page or a repo you already have opened)

Once you have your data in bit.io, head to your Retool home page and create a new Postgres Resource in Retool. You can get all the details you need (hostname, port, username, password) all in the Connect menu at bit.io!

Once you enter in the fields to connect to bit.io, your bit.io repo will be connected to Retool! Let's see how we can create a Retool widget to show this data:

To start, in your Retool app, create a new Resource query, and connect to the bit.io resource we just made.

From there, you can make any SQL query against your bit.io database. To keep it simple, we will copy-paste the SQL query from bit.io's query editor (make sure the remove the count identifier so we get the rows themselves).

Next paste that into the SQL editor on Retool. You can preview the query to make sure its working properly. Make sure to save the query!

From there, you can attach the query's data to a new table component.

And you're all set!

Using bit.io as the backend for your Retool dashboard allows the data on bit.io to act as one source of truth. You don't need to worry about potentially having multiple versions of your data strewn across data science and sales teams. It's also powerful for monitoring custom statistics: for example, your data science team can create custom bit.io views for important statistics for your organization. Retool can connect directly to these views, allowing your sales team to monitor vital statistics.

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