GitLab has revealed it is working on a new tool for the data science lifecycle. Meltano is an open-source solution designed to fill the gaps between data and understanding business operations.
“Meltano was created to help fill the gaps by expanding the common data store to support Customer Success, Customer Support, Product teams, and Sales and Marketing,” the team wrote in a post. “Meltano aims to be a complete solution for data teams — the name stands for model, extract, load, transform, analyze, notebook, orchestrate — in other words, the data science lifecycle. While this might sound familiar if you’re already a fan of GitLab, Meltano is a separate product. Rather than wrapping Meltano into GitLab, Meltano will be the complete package for data people, whereas GitLab is the complete package for software developers.”
The goal of Meltano is to make analytics accessible to everyone, not just data professionals. According to GitLab, while the company has experience collecting data and presenting it in a readable format to business users in order to make predictions based on the data, it takes too many steps and tools to complete this.
“The idea of bringing best practices from software development to data analytics is a huge draw for the Data team at GitLab. Ideally, all of our work could be done in open source tools, and could be version controlled, and we’d be able to track the state of the analytics pipeline from raw data to visualization,” GitLab wrote.
The tool currently only supports Postgres with plans to add Snowflake in the near future. The company knows it will need to support a wide variety of database types, and its looking for contributions from the open-source community to help meet that goal.
“As an open source tool, we think Meltano will make a big difference for teams without much money to invest in data analytics. It’s a new field for many organizations, and we want to do everything we can to make it easier for teams and business to access their data and make better decisions,” GitLab wrote.
