Elasticsearch's built-in visualization tool, Kibana, is robust and the appropriate tool in many cases. However, it is geared specifically towards log exploration and time-series data, and we felt that its steep learning curve would impede adoption rate among data scientists accustomed to writing SQL. The solution was to create something that would replicate some of Kibana's essential functionality while hiding Elasticsearch's complexity behind SQL-esque labels and terminology ("table" instead of "index", "group by" instead of "sub-aggregation") in the UI.
Elasticsearch's API is really well-suited for aggregating time-series data, indexing arbitrary data without defining a schema, and creating dashboards. For the purpose of a data exploration backend, Elasticsearch fits the bill really well. Users can send an HTTP request with aggregations and sub-aggregations to an index with millions of documents and get a response within seconds, thus allowing them to rapidly iterate through their data.
