Google Data Studio Part 2

I have been working with Google Data Studio for some of my visualisations. Now I say only some because I still have the issue with not being able to get it to connect to PostgreSQL and the Snowflake connector is a paid product. To address this I am looking at other products and am hopeful about Retool but will see what functionality is left once the free trail runs out. I am hoping that I am only using the free stuff.

Building my dashboard in Google Data studio has been pretty easy, there are some things I don't like or can't work out how to do but I am more of a technical data person than a visualisation person, at least for the last 5-6 years that has been the case.

Honestly the best thing to do it stick a data source in Google Data Studio and have a play. You basically pick a theme and drag and drop your dimensions and measures in and watch it build the graphs on the fly. Below are some graphics of the meu options, inserting a graph and manipulating it.

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My Latest project using Gen AI

So recently parkrun removed all their stats and as a keen running who is trying to work their way up the top 100 of their local parkrun I wanted to get some of these stats back and have a bit of "fun" at the same time. So here is a little "ETL" process that I developed with the help of Gen AI. The steps of my ETL: Copy and paste data into Google Sheets template where an AI produced formula extracts URLS from the text and puts them into a new field. This effectively allows me to extract the parkrun athlete id, the primary key, and use it in my analysis. I also have a column to autofill the data I am processing. Use an Gen AI generated Google Apps script to process it into a processed sheet, this allows me to build up a backlog of events (I had over 500 to process). This is then queried using a Gen AI Google sheets query to extract key information and columns / format times etc. I then ingest the fully processed sheet into Keboola directly from Google Sheets. ...

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Zapier

As much as I have enjoyed using Keboola there are some connections that it doesn't have or that just haven't worked for one reason or another. I actually came across Zapier as a solution for bringing in e-mails from parkrun to load my results every week. Honestly I have not found it to be as robust as Keboola but that might just be me archiving my e-mails before it completes it 15 minute poll. The second use case I am working on is the pulling in Strava data, for a fitness dashboard the fact it has a built in connector for Strava is great, though I am worried given the activities I do that I might reach the limit. I won't go into details on how to set things up but you can setup 5 Zaps that can run for a combined 100 runs during a month for free. In my data platform / solution I am using Zaps to load harder to get / automate data. It doesn't add much from a technical point of view as it is just signing into a few account to get the data into Google Sheets for downstr...

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