Skip to main content

Keboola

Keboola is my new favourite toy and I have lost many hours playing with it and so far all for free, they even have free training which I have mostly been able to follow with the free account, though the tool is clearly evolving quickly and the training is now over a year old. 

However finding Keboola and the free MySQL databases are what inspired me to start this project. 

What I like about Keboola (Free): 

  • So far (over a week) completely free and no credit card required. I am not anywhere near looking like I am going to use my allocation for this month. 
  • Easy to connect to Snowflake, Google Drive, Google Sheets, MySQL and much more. 
  • Free use of Snowflake, with Snowflake being so hot at the moment this is great. 
  • Lots of logging. 
  • Decent training that is mostly useful, 

The dashboard:


What I don't like: 

  • I couldn't get the gmail connector to work due to Google Security policies. 
  • Product is evolving so quickly that training is already date or can't be done on free tier? Including the tasks to get their certifications. 
  • Some things were not obvious but were, to be fair, answered by the training. 

Summary: 

I am sure I will do many more posts about Keboola but if you are an aspiring data person and want to widen your horizons or try out new tech then Keboola looks like a great option. Time will tell if I continue to find it interesting and easy to use, but so far I am impressed and love the ability so spin up a mini Snowflake database. 

Below is a screenshot of me using my snowflake database and I have linked to a very basic dashboard I built in a previous post. 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Generative AI News - 03/03/2024

Here are some of the latest news highlights related to Generative AI from this week: Venus Williams and Brain.ai : Tennis legend Venus Williams has ventured into interior design with Brain.ai , a new generative AI-powered platform 1 . It’s fascinating to see how generative AI is being integrated into various domains beyond smartphones. Google’s Gemini AI Controversy : Google’s chatbot, Gemini , faced controversy due to its image generator mistakenly placing people of colour in Nazi-era uniforms. This incident highlights the importance of responsible AI development 2 . Apple’s Focus on GenAI : Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company will “break new ground” in generative AI this year 2 . Keep an eye out for exciting developments from Apple. Morph Studio for Filmmaking : Morph Studio introduces an AI filmmaking platform that allows weaving Stability AI-generated video clips into movies 2 . A creative application of generative AI! Adobe’s Project Music : Adobe unveiled Project Music...

Creating a date dimension in dbt and Snowflake

A lot of the data that I am working with doesn't lend itself to creating complex star schemas (more on data modelling in a later post) however I want to try and at least want to go to some effort. The one thing that pretty much all my tables have in common is date, so I want to build a date dimension. My strength training happens on a day, my running and walking, parkrun and hopefully the weather data I intend to integrate will have a date on it. This means if I have a date dimension and I aggregate my various facts at date level I can use them together in a single visualisation.  There are various methods I could have used to create the date dimension and I went with using the dbt spine, this was really simple using the utilities:  Used the date functions in Snowflake to extract relevant fields such as year, month, day in words and year month etc. 

Gen AI News - 01/04/2024

According to Gemini here is the latest news:  Here's a rundown on some recent Generative AI news you might find interesting: Nvidia's New Architecture: Nvidia announced their next-gen "Blackwell" architecture for GPUs [1]. This promises a significant leap in performance for running large language models and other generative AI tasks. AI for Mental Health: An article highlighted how chatbots powered by generative AI are being used to help Gen Z with mental health struggles [2]. Amazon Invests in Anthropic: Amazon is making a further investment in Anthropic, an AI startup focused on developing safe and beneficial AI [2]. This suggests big players are keen on the potential of generative AI. Google and Reddit Partner Up: There have been talks about Google and Reddit forming a new partnership [4]. This could involve using generative AI for content creation or recommendation on Reddit. Overall, the field of Generative AI is seeing continued investment and de...