November Homeruns 🖤⚾

Special Black Friday deal - You tell your friends about us, and we won’t use a donut chart, ever!

Qlik

What is it: Qlik Sense has introduced the November 2024 update for its Client-managed offering (For those who manage their own environments, instead of relying on Qlik). This version update brings a new Navigation menu, Sheet Navigation, Sheet Grouping and UI settings.

There are a bunch of updates to visuals, including:

• In Pivot table, images can now be added to a cell with a URL, cell values can be copied, and export to image & PDF is possible among other capabilities

• Cyclic dimensions can now be set to an active field, and expression based labels

• Straight table text can now be stylized using expressions

• Other updates include a new selection bar, and updates to the Combo chart visual to set labels to markers & toggle for grids

The Scripting experience has been improved as well with a data preview feature for added insights, a search and replace feature in expression editor for bulk updates, and the ability to turn Autocomplete on/off in the script editor.

Check everything out here.

AWS

What is it: AWS has announced that the dbt adapter for Athena is now supported for dbt Cloud. Athena acts as a serverless query layer on top of Amazon S3 storage (you don’t need to worry about setting up servers or compute manually, as it automatically scales up and down with demand). Athena makes it easy to query and analyze raw, unstructured data in S3 using SQL, without needing to move your data to a lakehouse or warehouse.

So, where does dbt Cloud come in? It adds features like managed infrastructure, job scheduling (no need to orchestrate manually), version control, and monitoring. Combine that with Athena, which charges per scan, and you’ve got a potentially cost-effective setup. dbt models can structure and compress data, making Athena queries faster and cheaper.

Read more about the feature here.

Why it matters: Realistically, this combo makes setting up a modern data stack easier and more affordable. Plus, dbt Cloud goes beyond the basic dbt Core by offering features like managed infrastructure and scheduling - which makes life convenient for engineers. More convenient = More efficiency. If you’re working with large datasets in S3, this setup could save you both time and money while keeping your workflows flexible.

Microsoft

What is it: Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Real Time Intelligence in Fabric. Not sure what that means? No worries—Microsoft is still rolling out content about it. But here’s the short version: it’s an end-to-end solution for setting up event-driven systems (a.k.a. handling streaming data). We’re talking everything from pulling in event data to building dashboards, running analytics, and setting up alerts.

Activator (previously known as Reflex), now generally available, is a part of the Real-Time Intelligence suite in Microsoft Fabric. It allows you to set up alerts in response to threshold breaches in the form of Teams chats, emails, custom workflows, and more. Fabric offers a quick and easy setup for Activator, simplifying the configuration of follow-up actions.

Why it matters: During Ignite, the integration of Real-Time Intelligence into Fabric was one of the major announcements alongside SQL Server Integration in Fabric. Real-Time Intelligence seems to be the direction in which data platforms will invest heavily, as it can unlock a whole new ecosystem of analysis for customers and create opportunities for upsell for the platforms.

Data events action calendar 📅

• Toronto Data Professionals Community is hosting a virtual seminar on Leveraging Azure AI and Python for Data-Driven Decision Making on December 4th! Details here.

• Attend the Breakfast & Data Monetization event at Google NYC Office on December 11th. Hurry, seats limited to 50 people! Details here.

• AWS re:invent, which is a data conference around Gen AI, Analytics & Cloud is happening in Las Vegas from December 2-6th! Details here.

Cool Jobs in Data! 👩‍💻

• PwC is hiring for a Azure Cloud Solutions Architect, Senior Manager in Toronto, Canada

• Acryl Data is hiring a Senior Analytics Engineer in US (Remote)

• The Hershey Company is hiring a Director Data Analytics in Hershey, PA

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