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Welcome to Squirrels

· 2 min read
Tim Huang
Tim Huang
Co-Founder of Squirrels Analytics

Welcome to the official documentation website for Squirrels, an open-source project framework for building parameterizable REST APIs for dynamic data analytics! This is an easy-to-use framework for anyone who is familiar with SQL and YAML.

In today's web development world, REST APIs are known to be the "backbone of the internet". It allows two software applications across the world to communicate with each other and share data.

In today's data analytics world, requirements for data analytics and business intelligence are growing in most companies. But it often comes down to a few technical data experts to answer the growing number of data questions. For instance, suppose that today, a company executive asks for revenue by location for last year, and then tomorrow, asks for revenue by day of week for the last quarter only. For many organizations, these executives must rely on others to produce the required analytics rather than being able to retrieve the information themselves (for instance, by clicking a button in a graphical user interface). This often requires a lot of tedious work for the technical data experts to revise queries on a regular basis, even when several of these data queries take a similar shape but parameterized in different ways.

This is where Squirrels comes into play. It merges the two worlds of "REST APIs" and "data analytics" together! By creating dynamic datasets with a low-code framework and exposing them as REST APIs that accept query parameters and return a standard JSON structure, you allow others to self-serve the data analytics while having tight control over what they are allowed to query. And it's not just for internal analytics only, it can also be embedded in your customer-facing applications to expose analytics for external users!

Why is it named "Squirrels"?​

First off, it seems to be the trend that many data-relevant tools are named after animals (Pandas, Koalas, Polars, DuckDB, etc.). Not to mention, Squirrels runs on Python, a programming language named after an animal as well.

But more importantly, the phonetics of the word "squirrels" sounds like a blend between SQL and URLs, which encapsulates the purpose of this framework very well.