October Homeruns Halloween Edition 🎃⚾

Tableau

What is it: Tableau has introduced Spatial Parameters in its latest update. If you don’t know what Spatial Parameters are, well……get ready for a journey of a lifetime. We will keep it short - spatial parameters provide you the ability to use spatial objects such as polygons, lines etc. as an input to map based calculations in Tableau. For now, the use cases remain to be seen, but for those of you that are looking to take that discovery trip - here is the documentation from Tableau. Another nice starting point could be this video from Tableau Tim to get you started!

Qlik

What is it: Qlik has launched anonymous access for authentication free access to data assets intended for the public (think websites/publicly hosted apps etc.).

Why is it relevant: If you wanted to host public facing dashboards or datasets, for project showcases, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) data, or serve anything to the vast expanse of the web, Qlik Anonymous sets that up for you in a few easy steps. It also removes any barriers to interactions with your data, with the no login experience. While other platforms like Tableau and Power BI already gave this experience, Qlik has joined their likes with this feature.

All about the new feature here.

Databricks

What is it: Databricks has announced the general availability of Publish to Power BI from Unity catalog. This feature will allow users to easily add a step to their workflows to publish a Unity Catalog schema (database) to Power BI. Any relationships defined on primary keys within Unity Catalog, also get pushed to Power BI service so you don’t have to worry too much about modelling.

Why it matters: This feature allows a more integrated experience in Databricks Unity Catalog, eliminating the need to switch between platforms when creating a dataset in Power BI service. Another advantage is that you can skip Power BI desktop altogether, and create a fully fledged dataset within Databricks. This could specially come in handy for Mac users since Power BI desktop is not compatible with Apple, yet.

Check it out here.

AWS

What is it: AWS has announced the general availability of Zero-ETL integrations between Dynamo DB and Redshift, their data warehousing platform. Zero ETL integrations eliminate the need to manually create and schedule pipelines for landing data into your target data store such as a lakehouse or a data warehouse.

This feature enables you to query your Dynamo DB data more efficiently using SQL based commands, once data is landed in Redshift. Use cases include running ML experiments on pseudo streaming data, running analytical workloads in a more performant environment, as well as joining data from different data stores.

Why it matters: This feature could allow easier ingestion of data which should make life easier for Data engineers. However, two implications to consider - maintenance and observability could be tricky and secondly, you are still creating a copy of your data which requires additional storage.

Check it out here.

Data events action calendar

• PASS data summit is in Seattle from from November 4th to 8th. Details here.

• Databricks Data + AI World Tour coming to Toronto on November 14th! Mark your calendar, this is one you can’t afford to miss! Details here.

Cool Jobs in Data!

• Air Canada is looking for a Solution Architect, Data & Analytics in Toronto

• Best buy is looking for a Senior Data Analyst in Canada

• Crowdstrike is looking for a Data Engineer (Remote, US)

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