Right-brain Data Visualizations: What works? Why?

Let’s set aside technical considerations and just explore a few unorthodox data visuals.  Why?  Because doing so helps us to reward viewers eye’s and brains.  At work, our eyes and brains are often forced to slog through repetitive logic and boring visual symbols that leave us uninspired, but an interesting visual can nudge us in… Read More

Live Presentation: Lean Data Model Storming For Project Leaders

Data Models are a’changin!  To learn about these changes, please join me Saturday, Oct 15, as I present “Lean Data Model Storming for Data Project Leaders” at the Southland Technology (SoTec) Conference 2016.  To view my session abstract, click here. This premier event, underwritten by PMI, AITP, IIBA and QAI, will bring together hundreds of… Read More

Data Preparation Is Easy with Alteryx

Without support from I.T., analysts increasingly need to perform data preparation tasks of varying complexity in order to wrangle data into shape for current analytic needs.  Using Alteryx Designer, many such tasks are simple and intuitive.  Let’s consider an example. For the completed Alteryx workflow sample published in Alteryz product documentation, assume that, due to… Read More

Fun with Calculations in Tableau

A recent customer gave me a chance to exercise Tableau features, on both the Server and Desktop. Although this write-up is focussed more on calculation than visualization, it also demonstrates my approach to visualizing complex data with a simple, impossible to misunderstand, presentation. My customer wanted visualizations that would bring simplicity to a rather complex… Read More

Snowflake’s Elastic Data Warehouse as a Service: Favorite Features

Since I am currently working with Snowflake Elastic Datawarehouse (see http://www.snowflakecomputing.com), and excited about what experts regard as it’s game-changing innovations (for a summary, see http://www.snowflake.net/blog/top-10-cool-things-i-like-about-snowflake/  ), I want to take a moment and describe my own personal favorite features.  But first, some quick background:  Snowflake is a built-for-cloud, MPP column-oriented, **ANSI-SQL-COMPLIANT** data warehouse service… Read More

Universal Data Vault: Hyper-Generalized Data Vault — Review of John Giles’ Case Study

I recently came across an interesting data-modeling case study.  John Giles, who wrote it, is also the author of the insightful and — for us data geeks — entertaining book, ‘The Nimble Elephant’.  In this UDV case study, John combined his strategy of applying, and establishing variations from, universal data-modeling patterns to Dan Linstedt’s Data Vault EDW methodology, with very practical results in a challenging… Read More