@qqq my users would be very unhappy with me if I told them they could only build rigidly defined segments. I know most of their query patterns (and log/instrument everything for analysis), but they are constantly coming up with fancier ways of segmenting our users. It's nice that I can enable business to be very flexible with the way they use my system.

@bja: what does your software do? when I look at fb, pinterest, snapchat, slack, evernote, instagram, whatsapp;, it seems all their queries are well defined beforehand

the end-users of my system have very well-defined queries against elasticsearch

the business users of the admin/analytics system want flexible ways to segment user behavior so that we can better personalize emails, push messages, and offer promotions

ah, so you're writing business intelligence / analytics software (for which adhoc queries makes sense), not consumer facing apps