// the find
shzlw/poli
An easy-to-use BI server built for SQL lovers. Power data analysis in SQL and gain faster business insights.
Poli is a self-hosted BI tool built on Spring Boot with a React frontend. You write SQL directly, connect it to any JDBC data source, and get a drag-and-drop dashboard editor out of it. It's aimed at small teams that want Metabase-style dashboards without the Metabase complexity or price.
Single JAR + SQLite deployment is genuinely frictionless — no separate database required to run the tool itself. JDBC-anything support means you can point it at Postgres, MySQL, Elasticsearch, or whatever else your stack uses without fighting a connector ecosystem. The pixel-perfect drag-and-drop positioning is a real differentiator over tools that force you into grid columns. Row-level security via user attributes is present and working, which most tools at this scale skip entirely.
Dead project — last commit January 2023, no activity since. The React frontend is class components on an old Create React App setup; adopting this means inheriting a maintenance burden with no upstream. SQL injection risk is real: the query execution path takes user-supplied SQL and runs it against live JDBC connections — the row-level security model requires careful setup and one misconfigured data source hands users arbitrary read access. No scheduled reports or email delivery built in, so if you want automated distribution you're building it yourself.