All Hands on Data #51
Welcome to the 51st edition of All Hands on Data! We get to welcome 2 new crew members this week, Arynn Martin-Post and Shawn Fergus. Check out their submission along with the rest of the teams below!
Correctly Loading Incremental Data at Scale
Despite the less-than-exciting title, the article does a really great job highlighting considerations and engineering team must take in order to properly configure a pipeline to accommodate incremental data loading. Focusing on incremental loading ensures an efficient data warehouse is available to provide access to clean and usable data. - John Forstmeier
Is Robotic Process Automation Intelligent?
Prior to reading this article, I didn't know anything about Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Traditionally, RPA has focused on automating routine, short-running tasks that lack an API for system-to-system integration. However, Hiltbrand outlines how the merging of RPA and AI is adding some real value to businesses. - Katt Baum
The Delta Between Trust And Usability: Where Data Management Still Falls Short
There are a lot of interesting statistics about the lack of trust with data, though it has become increasingly important for executives to have access to this data. It speaks very much to the overall landscape of data technology where the focus has gone from having these expensive elaborate stacks, to focusing on core data principals to ensure data is trustworthy and actionable. - Angel Catalan
A Question is the Start
I'm new to the data space and in the early stages of drinking from the firehose. Data stacks are complicated, there's hundreds upon hundreds of "solutions," and losing sight of your goals can be all too easy. This piece offers four simple questions to continually ask yourself. Doing so will help you to be more efficient, effective, and sane. - Shawn Fergus
We need to talk about excel
When we talk about the data vendor ecosystem, especially in the BI space, the elephant in the room is Excel. It is a common gripe that end users just want to download data to Excel. But why? What makes Excel so great? David analyzes Excel with the same depth and rigor that we look at tools in the modern data stack - including a list of the pros and cons. - Arynn Martin-Post
Power BI now integrates with Jupyter Notebooks!
I love Jupyter Notebooks. They help me keep my code readable as well as provide a less scary interface for business users to look at code. Thankfully, there is now an even easier way to do this with an integration with PowerBI. Check out this article that walks you through how to integrate your Jupyter Notebooks with PowerBI. - Steven Johnson