Gen AI Data Guy

Have I finally found my BI Tool, one that lets me import data from Snowflake and share it for free? I know, no sooner have I posted about how hard it was to find a tool that could do anything from Snowflake than I come across Zoho. You can check out my dashboard on the following page . Below is a diagram that outlines the processes I have used to obtain this data. In summary my parkrun e-mail is pushed to Google Sheets every week by Zapier and Forms I submit every day are used to track the strength training I do. Keboola is then used to ingest this data into MySQL and or Snowflake where I then use views or the built in transformation processes in Keboola to shift the data into a format for reporting. Google Data Studio then connects to MySQL and Zoho to Snowflake to visualise the data. 

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. 

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 ...