September Lead-Off edition 🏁⚾

Author

Varun Mishra
September 13, 2024

Japanese language has three writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Kanji primarily consists of Chinese characters, Katakana is used for loanwords (from other languages), and Hiragana is used for Japanese grammar. You can now flex about that fact to your friends!

We now have a dedicated events section 📅 for Data events that you should definitely check out. Today’s reading time is 4 minutes.

In today’s newsletter:

1️⃣ Databricks has launched a slew of new features for its AI/BI offering, including cross filtering between visuals, static widget parameters for filtering, ability to set default filters and more!
2️⃣ Google has introduced the Anthropic family of Gen AI models to its BigQuery platform, allowing analysts and business users to harness the power of Anthropic’s models in BigQuery using SQL!
3️⃣ AWS has rolled out job queuing for its Glue data integration service to offset manual management and limits of concurrency!

Business Intelligence 💡📊

Databricks

  • Databricks has introduced cross-filtering, allowing you to select an element of a visual on a dashboard to filter all other visuals on the same dashboard. It is available only for certain visualizations and is automatically enabled across the entire canvas.

  • Static widget parameters have been introduced to parameterize visualizations created using a common dataset. This allows you to showcase two different visuals using the same SQL query (e.g., trips covered by a taxi on weekdays vs. weekends). This feature could bridge the gap for the requirement of field-based filters directly on visualizations.

  • You can now set default values to help users land on a default state of the visualization that you prefer. Default filters apply to the entire dataset, meaning all visuals based on that dataset will apply the filters.

  • Query-based parameters have been added, allowing fields to be integrated into visualizations. This will allow dynamic swapping of any dimension (attributes) on axis in visualizations. If you’re familiar with dynamic parameters in Power BI, this would seem familiar.

Why it matters: Databricks AI/BI is like the shiny new object, but it could be worth it for organizations looking to reduce time to insights for business users. Databricks seems to be building its AI/BI offering from the ground up with natural language queries which might be interesting if you are looking for self service BI strategy.

You can read more here - https://dbricks.co/3AQjbYc

Data Engineering 🛠️📊

Google BigQuery

Google’s at it again! They’ve teamed up with Anthropic (you know, that AI company with models for all kinds of use cases) to bring some of their top ML models straight to BigQuery. We’re talking Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Haiku, and Claude 3 Sonnet—the whole gang’s here! 

Source: Anthropic

Why it matters: BigQuery isn’t just your average data warehouse anymore. With Generative AI and ML models in the mix, Google’s making it super easy for business users to dive into AI. If you’re all about SQL and not so much about writing Python code, do check this one out!

Check this feature out here.

Data Orchestration 🔄📊

AWS

AWS has launched job queuing for Glue, its data integration service. With this update, concurrency for data sources needing parallel processing would see an increased success rate. This is made possible by automatically staggering jobs by AWS, thereby reducing the impact of limits or quotas that may have been set on your account. Previously, hitting these quotas resulted in job failure.

Why it matters: If you’ve got a bunch of data sources or events all trying to grab your attention at once, it’s like trying to juggle flaming torches while riding a unicycle—exciting but a bit chaotic! Give this feature a try if you have been facing failures with your Glue jobs.

Read more here.

Data events action calendar

🔥 Fall events in Data are heating up! You don’t want to miss these key conferences and meetups! Check out the exciting lineup coming your way 👇:

1️⃣ Snowflake is organizing a virtual hands on training on September 26th for AI Data Cloud covering data warehousing concepts. Details here.
2️⃣ Data Engineer Things' virtual Data Engineering & ML Summit October 3rd-4th . Hear from Data Practitioners on real-world problem statements! Register here.
3️⃣ Dbt labs is hosting Coalesce (analytics engineering conference) 2024 in Las Vegas from October 7th-10th. The agenda includes workshops and certifications which has got us excited. Details here.
4️⃣ IBM TechXchange in Las Vegas on October 21st. Dive deep with the Business Analytics User Community on Planning, Cognos, and Controller updates! Details here.
5️⃣ Databricks Data + AI World Tour coming to Toronto on Nov 14th! Mark your calendar, this is one you can’t afford to miss! Details here.

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