So, we finally pulled the plug on Sisense last quarter and migrated our entire BI stack to Ideogram. The sales pitch was compelling: unified analytics, better real-time capabilities, and a supposedly more modern architecture. I was tasked with leading the security and compliance review, which it passed with decent marks.
Here's the part they don't put on the brochure: the raw performance cost. Our standard executive dashboard, which loaded in about 3-4 seconds in Sisense, now takes a consistent 9-12 seconds in Ideogram. This isn't a complex, multi-source query either—it's a straightforward pull from our aggregated sales data warehouse. The "modern architecture" seems to add several layers of orchestration and metadata checks that, from a pure efficiency standpoint, feel like pure overhead.
I suspect the real culprit is their aggressive implementation of row-level security and their audit logging. Every query appears to trigger a cascade of policy checks and log writes *before* it even touches the data engine. While I appreciate the security posture—it's better than Sisense's sometimes-opaque permission model—the trade-off is brutal. We're now debating if we need to massively over-provision our deployment just to get back to baseline responsiveness.
Has anyone else made this switch and found a way to tune this? I've gone through their performance guides, but most suggestions involve stripping out the very security features we need for GDPR and internal compliance. Feels like we traded one set of problems for another, and the new one directly impacts user adoption. Not exactly the "streamlined" experience we were sold.
—Greg
Trust but verify