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Google Data Studio - Part 1

As part of the project to work on a free data solution I have been looking into data visualisation tools. I have already done a post on Snowflake which has limited capabilities, I have also used Power BI however this has limited sharing options on the free plan. In my day jobs I have used various Oracle tools including OAC utilising the RPD and really badly I have used Excel. 

Personally the best free tool, honestly probably the best tool other than it missing the data modelling layer, is Google Data Studio. I have found it fairly intuitive and for the most part easy to get the results I wanted. 

Probably the bit I was most impressed with was the data visualisations stuff, see part 2 (on its way), however setting up supported data sources is also very easy. Note the at the moment Snowflake is not supported by Google itself. 

To get going:

  • Create a data source, this can use a Google Connector or one of many of their other customer produced connectors.  


  • Once you have picked a data connector you have a to setup the credentials. Depending on the data source this will vary, below is me connecting to the free MySQL database. 


  • Once you have your connection and table or query selected you will be presented with a list of fields to configure. Once you have done this you are good to go. 
Part 2 I will have a look at building the report which can be found below:

https://datastudio.google.com/s/oni0oJunV5U

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