I had a back-of-the-mind goal to run a half marathon by the end of the semester. There were many internal points against doing something like this. A small one is that a marathon distance is quite arbitrary and setting a numbers goal when that number didn’t feel personal to me…

carnism, fake spiritual epiphanies, and lobster pets — 3 ones this time, folks. 1/3 Carnism is a cool, dark word. The word vegan isn’t just a diet choice. It carries a lot of carry-on baggage. What this person values. What they’ll talk about at the dinner table, to you, when you don’t ask. Their stance on animal welfare, social welfare, communism, organic fair trade coffee…

Learn four (and a half) ways to quickly turn your Excel data into databases or SQL queries. Streamline your data uploading, transformation and loading with these handy tools. — Data in Excel can be analyzed and visualized within the software but you might want to export the data to a database or query the data using SQL. You could be getting files that by themselves don’t exceed Excel’s row limit but when combined can’t fit in one file. Sure…

We cover 2 ways to connect Shopify data to Power BI. The first is to use Power BI Connector — a Shopify app with free options. — Analyzing your Shopify store data is integral to maximizing your store’s impact. One way you can dig deep into your data is by using Shopify’s inbuilt Analytics feature. This is great if you want to run some ad-hoc analyses, get results, and act on it immediately. However, this route isn’t…

We cover using Power Query in Excel for very large csv’s and it’s drawbacks. Followed by a Bring Your Own Database solution and the ease of using Dropbase to solve all of your flat file conundrums — Sometimes, Excel’s million row limit is far below what you need for your work. You can experience sluggishness, formatting errors, and random crashes at far below the limit as well. So, what can you do if you have a data file that has something close to or over 1,048,576 rows…

Learn how Dropbase Pipelines can help automate your ETL workflows — even with offline, flat files! We discuss how Dropbase provides an at-the-edge ETL experience, and share a video demo of Dropbase Pipelines. — What are Data Pipelines and “at the edge ETL “? Data pipelines are a sequence of steps that extract data from many sources, possibly apply any transformations and then load the data to a destination. Data pipelines are commonly abbreviated as ETL or ELT, depending on when the data is transformed.

We cover the quantitative (the IPO model) and qualitative factors to help with your team’s data warehouse decision. — Consider the following scenarios: You’re in a fast-growing startup fresh out of funding and you now have to tighten up on reporting to your angel investors. Your company is thinking of an expansion to a new location and wants to consolidate its data. Or, The lean startup you’re in spends…

Learn about how Holistics Software can solve your Business Intelligence (BI) needs. — A company that grows fast has to be informed about a seemingly endless amount of information: Sales revenue, customer acquisition costs, churn, retention, etc. To create those actionable insights, you could continue doing something like this: Get weekly data emailed to you as a .csv Clean and format the data…

I’ve been lying so far. I’m not technically in Mumbai, but in an adjacent city called Navi Mumbai (literally, “New Mumbai”). To the Canadians out there, I’m in the North York of India’s Toronto. Navi Mumbaikers love saying what’s better here: wider roads, cleaner roads, trees on roads … and…