News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus. Parent comment

Re:Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus by _delirium on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @05:09PM (#28609999)
> And if you ask why it’s often because they couldn’t find the answer to their incredibly specific one-time only question, so they decided it’s all useless and they continue to work on their own personal homegrown BI-suite in excel.

Hah this is probably me. The university I work for uses a BI tool (MicroStrategy) to track students/majors/etc. But I usually find it easier to use the BI tool primarily as a way to get a CSV or XLS export of enough source data to answer my question, and then do the actual analysis in Python+pandas. I can probably formulate my query in their weird proprietary query builder, but it seems unnecessarily complicated and I already know how to do data analysis in Python.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus by perl4ever on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @06:50PM (#28611009)
>their weird proprietary query builder

If you're talking about Power Query, the best way to use it is to write code directly once you observe what the interface generates. It's a rather nice kind-of-functional language that really comes into its own when you start using/creating higher order functions.

Power Query gave me an intense craving for a form of SQL with a similar facility for functions.

For example, I have a lot of experience writing Oracle SQL, and Power Query didn't offer "grouping sets". But I realized it could be implemented using functions. It would be so great if SQL supported that.

[ Parent | on HN ]