I've been in BI for about 4 years. I have pretty good SQL skills, python, alteryx , etls in ssms. My BS is in Operations but that didn't stop me getting into the analytics department. What do I need to do to get there in say 3 years? Going back to school to get a master's is not something I plan to do either.

Businesses that are of international/high standard, do not necessarily have to operate internationally for eg. home depot.

How do they price their services/products?

Like take a chipotle burrito.

Are companies using the CPI or is it only based on cost?

I would like to do academic research in this area. What search terms should I use?

In your orgs, have any of you built or used predictive analytics? Either from scratch or in a low code like Alteryx. In general, is there much interest in analysts having access to building, training, explaining ML models (even if you don't have the technical skills)? Or is it just a buzzword

Any idea why this query works

CALCULATE(
    SUM(PatientBalanceAging[PatientPortion]),
    FILTER(
        'PatientBalanceAging',
        INT( CONVERT( MAX( 'Date'[Year] ), STRING ) & "1231" ) = 
        'PatientBalanceAging'[Date]
    )
)

But this query doesn't? They seem to be the same to me, is it because my cube has a Year Month Child Relationship?

CALCULATE(
    SUM(PatientBalanceAging[PatientPortion]),
    FILTER(
        'PatientBalanceAging',
        INT(LEFT(PatientBalanceAging[Date], 4)) = MAX('Date'[Year]) &&
        INT(MID(PatientBalanceAging[Date], 5, 2)) = MAX('Date'[Month]) &&
        INT(RIGHT(PatientBalanceAging[Date], 2)) = 31
    )
)

So in my cube, I have a year (parent) and month (child) in the column. No values returned, but the first query will return fine if I just have a year column.

https://preview.redd.it/dw2bdx2jx11d1.png?width=656&format=png&auto=webp&s=b80248a6e4926af37bb0c91a9a3bb19b7fc026d1

What are your go-to freelance platforms for hiring? Especially for a tight budget.

How to create a bar like this? https://imgur.com/a/VUjDIv0 (zoom in to see it properly)

I have been asked to update the graph above. Given that I have new numbers, which are different from previous years, meaning the distribution of categories will differ.

My colleague did everything manually in Powerpoint by stacking bars on each other, and it took him a LONG time.

Is there a possibility to perhaps create this in Excel/Powerpoint/other tool by adding the numbers and asking the software to create the chart?

Hi,

I want to leverage my strong experience in BI and analytics for Non profit sector to do meaningful work for society. But not able to find relevant options. Either those organisations don't leverage data much or pay is very less.

Can someone please guide me?

I am based out of India.

Hey everyone, who is using thought spot?

I'm trying to put together a business case to move from Looker. Their pricing works around a base price plus as number of flexible credits. The pro pricing we got works out at approx 1300 credits (queries) per user per year. This seems unreasonably low. Especially based on our looker usage.

Does anyone have any insight on how thought spot pricing / useage worked out at your organisation.

Thanks !

Hi everyone, I'm a data analyst/BI developer with over 12 plus years of experience in domains like operations, retail/e-commerce, security and compliance, among others. I'm passionate about uncovering trends and driving business growth. I usually manage the projects I work on as well. I'm actively seeking a new opportunity to leverage my skills. Are there any openings at your companies that might be a good fit for my skillset? If anyone has job search advice or leads, I'd be happy to return the favor in the future by reviewing a resum’e or helping with a project. Please respond here or email any leads or suggestions at lelandanza@gmail.com.

Thanks so much!

We are looking for technology to replace current BI system based partially on SSAS.

Where you can create measures, for example, a section of the auto generated SSAS Cube would have:

{
"name": "3223_27527_ Vendor Name",
"expression": "DISTINCTCOUNT('Form_3223_ Market Vendor Attendance'[23503_ Vendor Name])"
},

Then, if the end user then uses this in dashboard that supports SSAS (eg: BoldBI, PowerBI) in a chart that displays a number, it would show a single numeric results of a query equivalent to:

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT `23503_ Vendor Name``) AS DistinctVendorCount
FROM `Form_3223_ Market Vendor Attendance`;

However, and here is something really cool about what SSAS does, that I have not found any other solution in the market to provide the same functionality:

If the user now goes, and creates a Bar Chart, drags the SAME measure expression defined above, BUT also drags a filter, say Vendor Type column - the bar automatically populates! By reverse engineering, the matching SQL query is:

SELECT `23505_ Vendor Type` AS VendorType,
       COUNT(DISTINCT `23503_ Vendor Name``) AS VendorCount
FROM `Form_3223_ Market Vendor Attendance`
GROUP BY `23505_ Vendor Type`;

This gives the same data needed for a bar chart!

I cant programmatically create varying views like that, when the user does not know how he want to slice the data until actually working on it, because I only have one data point without the filter.

Adding the filter in advance is not practical for the business needs, and playing around with changing it in one part of the platform, then going back into dashboard to see the effects of the newly generated View, is also not great UX experience.

For business reasons, there is a constraint forcing the use of this model, relying on user defining partial things like I've explained, and only later slicing into dimensions.

However SSAS has to go its just too slow (and expensive).

The only alternative I've found, is Apache Kylin, but it seem to be old, Java based, not well maintained, lacks community support - I've spent hours trying to set it up using:

1. Docker (no arm image), and even using amd64 on Mac, it just gets stuck on some components.
2. Direct install using the tar file - ${KYLIN_HOME}/bin/kylin.sh start just hangs there, no log file is created I can't tell what's going on with it.

This and lack of documentation in various aspects, makes me feel its not something we can base a new solution on.

But I have not found any other solution that'd provide the above described functionality.

Any advice, please?

Hyperbole, obviously. But there are 20+ startups doing some version of a SQL chatbot that can connect to data, build interactive visualizations, and run semi-advanced analysis.

OpenAI just announced that exact feature set, plus some extra goodies. Right now it only integrates with your Google Drive, but it's not a big leap from here to data warehouses.

https://openai.com/index/improvements-to-data-analysis-in-chatgpt/

8 months in and i want out at my company. Leadership are all from non-technical background and it shows. Org. design treats BI work as a factory assembly line. Quality of work sucks and performance is measured by output and not outcomes. This group is viewed as a cost center with work being outsourced to cheap labor contracting companies in india. General culture is top down and conformity is valued over individuality. Upper management is delusional about the issues probably because they don’t understand the nature of BI work.

During interviews they marketed themselves well and i couldn’t see through the BS. I don’t want to make the same mistake again because this job has definitely moved my career backwards and stress from the job has affected my physical health.

What questions do you ask during the interviews to spot red flags?

To baseline my perspective, I've been doing/leading Business Intelligence for 10+ years. Often when I talk to people who are in University "taking a Business Intelligence class" they tell me they're: Learning Tableau and sometimes data visualization skills with it (I don't equate learning charts alone to learning data visualization) Getting Alteryx certified, or even learning Excel formulas, and that's the ONLY thing they learn. This is fine, but I would hardly call a single tool/skillset like that Business Intelligence and it honestly makes me not recommend taking a University course like that to anyone (especially when a $10 Udeny course can teach you more for less). I'd love to hear your thoughts and perspective to expand the sample size from which I pull this opinion (I'm only one person with one perspective)

I'm 6 months into my BA/DA role. Simple ratio, customer payments/writeoff. However, my question is, my company has some bad debt write offs for customers which are in the cents. So if they had a years worth of bills/cents, that's going to be an extremely high ratio which is masking other trends that I want to see. So I had an excel formula that says =IF(writeoff=0, 15, IF(writeoff<20, 10, revenue/writeoff)). 4 and under is considered bad, 10 is considered great. Is my excel correct to account for smaller writeoff amounts, and how do I determine that "sweet spot" of "hey, they have minimal or no writeoff, let's put them to an automatic 10 when usually they could be considered a 400". (Most of the ratios are between 3 and 10). Or does this not even matter, because regardless, the trends will be the same, just not as pronounced? Thanks!

We're working through modernizing our data stack and want to move to DBT to build our Transformation layer prior to Looker/Tableau frontends. We're struggling to rationalize the additional investment to DBT Cloud and wondering if this community has strong feeling one way or another. We're using Airflow for orchestration so it seems we'd be able to orchestrate from there, and use the CLI to manage DBT. Are the GUI and other additional features worth the investment?

I've found these links which do provide some context (with all the marketing fluff):

https://www.getdbt.com/product/dbt-core-vs-dbt-cloud

https://www.getdbt.com/blog/why-upgrade-dbt-core-to-cloud

I have heard this narrative - any company that needs BI already has it, and those that don’t will never buy one because they likely have some homegrown stuff that meet their needs. The world doesn’t need another BI tool in 2024. How strongly do you agree or disagree with this point of view?

Basically the title - does Google Looker (Data) Studio handle star schema or snowflake schema datasets effectively, or should I look into alternative tools?

I imported data via excel sheet to my dashboard. It's local by the way, so I have never created a live interactive board before, is this normal?

Secondly, if I have new data with the same structure, do I launch on Power Query Editor and just try to append the data there? Keep in mind I have never done this before, sorry for the newbie question, thank you!

I am a data analysis / BI enthusiast and am seeking to apply the concepts I am studying at my job. Recently, I gained some notoriety for producing some reports using statistics, tools, and data analysis techniques in my role. This has led to a demand to perform some specific analyses for the senior management.

However, as I continue to work and receive feedback, I am noticing opportunities to improve and make these reports more precise. But this is making me feel insecure about presenting these changes because it will basically highlight my amateurishness in this area.

For example, in one report I calculated the average of a particular measure. Initially, I did not remove the outliers. I ended up delivering the report this way and later informed my supervisor that this could affect the average and I could remove them and send a corrected version, but he said it was not necessary. Now, I am making a report on the same measure, but within a different context and removed the extremes before delivering. Moreover, while studying the second context, I had ideas on how to conduct a more precise analysis that I would like to apply to the first case.

In short, the issue of making reports directly for senior management, while I am still studying statistics, is making me feel insecure, especially when noticing that I might have made an imprecise analysis of some sort.

Hi,

let me start with an example:
Imagine you own a taxi company with 10,000 cars. You keep track of these cars in a table, where different columns represent car attributes like color, model, brand, city of operation, and whether they're currently out of order. These details can change over time; for instance, a car might be red today but blue tomorrow.

Now, you want to analyze how these details have changed over time. Why? Well, let's say you group your cars by brand and count how many were out of order each year. You might find that Toyota had the fewest breakdowns last year, while Subaru had the most. This information could help you make decisions, like buying more Toyotas because they require less maintenance, saving you money.
Here I tried to visualize this example to make it more clear:

https://preview.redd.it/54pzunbkgszc1.png?width=1809&format=png&auto=webp&s=e264e940f5daf9a17ad0829afdb3412757c332e6

My question is if such reporting on historical changes of tables is a common use case and if anyone actually dealt with it?

As I approach my one-year mark in my current role, I'm seeking advice and insights. I'm fortunate to have early access to Copilot at my workplace and want to create an impactful presentation on its capabilities. Any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

You walk in the door in a Microsoft shop what do you install or get access to? I'll start it:

Power BI
VScode (for Pandas and mucking around in python)

SSMS (yea I know I could use VSCode extension but best to use the tools/lingo of your testers and DBAs)
Notepad++
Figma (for mockups although if data is simple I'd just mock data and PowerBI it)
Clover (windows explorer upgrade - I like it for folder only view)
Test Environment access for all your business platforms (i.e. talk to testers first)

Later on power automate if they'll give me a license

We are in the process of selecting a BI tool to offer analytics services to various clients. We've ruled out Tableau due to its high costs, and Power BI isn't an option because it lacks support for Macs. We're seeking an affordable or open-source solution with the following features:

• Basic to intermediate visualization capabilities, with the potential to embed Python-related visualizations (for those clients that want some very specific visualization)
• Ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources.
• Capability to create both internal (private, with user access controls) and external (public) dashboards.
• Maximum compatibility across platforms, ideally based on web standards (such as HTML5).
• Easy sharing options that don't require users to download or install anything.

We are a small team of developers specialized in Data Science and Data Engineering, but we lack a background in infrastructure management (e.g., Terraform, Kubernetes, etc.). We are currently using dbt to create the tables for our dashboards.

Any recommendations or insights from your experiences would be greatly appreciated!

I'm currently looking into Grafana, Superset, Metabase, and Dash.

PS: The posts related to this topic I've found in the community are at least a few years old, so I decided to create a new one :)

We have a sass application that we would like to bring business analysis functions into. Our requirements are simple:

1. Import data from sql server into an analysis server and build all the models.

2. Have the ability to query the analysis server by a tenant, using a claim from the JWT for example.

3. The ability to report on the models on the front end using react integrated into the app.

We tried Azure analysis service but it’s a bit of a mess because of the tenant requirements.

Also found flexmonster this could work well and we’re evaluating it now.

Anyone having any luck integrating a business analysis platform into your Sass with these different components, or other approaches?

Thank you in advance.

Hi, I'm working with an agency team that needs to collect and consolidate data from spreadsheets.

Note that each spreadsheet originates from a different client. They may have the same information, but they're never going to be consistent. Plus, we have to stick to file uploads since a direct API integration is not realistic.

Ideally, we would upload the files into an app which we could program to rename, reformat, and reorder the columns. Once the data is transformed, it would get written to a table in our data warehouse. Bonus point if we could also have the ability to overwrite or delete data from a flawed file upload.

This might be an oversimplified description, but I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for this use case. I'm familiar with apps like Flatfile, One Schema, CSVImporter, and Droom -- but they seem like embeddable SDKs. Since internal users will be making these uploads, we don't need anything whitelabeled.

Any thoughts are appreciated -- thx!

The company I work for uses a software application called Business Alerts. BA periodically (on a custom schedule) reads our ERP database through a SQL query and then sends emails based on the conditions it finds. There are two types of alerts:

1. Query: Sends email based on a SQL query. For example, send an email to all sales reps with a list of late sales orders for their territories. A sales order will show up on the email every day until it is no longer late.
2. Monitor: Takes a snapshot of the database and, when it runs, compares the new snapshot to the old snapshot and sends emails based on the differences. For example, send an email to the sales team showing them all parts where the price has changed. A part will only show up on the email if the price today is different from the price yesterday.

We have been using this software for several years and have become dependent on it. Unfortunately, the company that provides the software no longer sells it and has discontinued support. I need to find something to replace it, but I'm having trouble.

I have looked at a few data visualization solutions (Power BI, Tableau, Domo) but none of them do what I need and most are overkill. I found one solution called Knowledgesync which looks like it would work, but it doesn't support our database (Pervasive).

Can anyone suggest a solution that might replace our discontinued Business Alerts software?

Thank you.

I did MicroStrategy work for 25 years as a reseller, consultant and employee using it (starting back in 1997).  I've never seen any other BI tool which worked in a similar way (common, central defined metadata which could then generate multipass sql against a central DW).  Maybe years ago, Business Objects came sort of close (but distant second).  Are there are modern BI tool that have a similar central common metadata model?  

thanks

Hi,

I have been freelancing in business intelligence (dashboarding, automating data collection, etc.) for about 9 months. I worked with small companies, and I have a business/accounting background, which allows me to interact very closely with the end users to coordinate actionable strategy after I put together the data, putting me in an interesting position, responsibilities-wise.

If you have similar role, do you:

a) Put the concrete action following by the effect, e.g. "Built customer support dashboard to monitor agent activity and assisted in structuring an employee reward system, resulting in a 40% increase in customer satisfaction and quicker response times."

b) put the effect first, followed by the action, e.g. "Increased customer satisfaction by 40% and shortened customer support agent responses time by creating a dashboard to monitor agent activity and structuring an employee rewards program."

Using the action first puts the concrete, "point to it" contributions front-and-center, but risks portraying you solely as a technician. Using the effect first is slightly vaguer, drifting towards "Responsible for...." territory, and could undercut my contributions as a technical user.

What do you find more effective when applying/interviewing/pitching new clients?

Hi, asking a question since we have an Oracle database in our work and i was wondering if connecting a BI tool directly to the database is considered a good practice? i'm trying to connect a Metabase to Oracle and i'm afraid of slow performance in the database because of many dashboards going to get created by the users.