Gen AI Data Guy

So I wanted to see if I could test the different Gen AI models that are out there and get them to write a relatively simple SQL query. Basically select against my table, as detailed in the prompts to Gen AI, and produce a list of the fastest 1000 times at an event (that takes place weekly) and provide the times and names of the athletes that ran said times. Note that although I say view a lot I mean query because what are views if not stored queries anyway and I am using this in my DB as a view.  Winner : Copilot The original view can be seen below:  So it is a fairly simple view with some logic in it to through some spanners in the works. The question is with the table definition and some explanation can the Gen AI platforms recreate a working version of the above view?  The initial Prompt:  I can't find a good way to format and embed my whole chats with the AI tools so I will work with what I have. Here is my original prompt that I used to get a starting point....

Over the last few days I have been playing with Streamlit. This is a really useful library that effectively lets you build an interactive dashboard using python. In theory, and somewhat in practice, I can now / have handled extracting data from APIs and DBs, transformed the data using pandas, loaded it into my final database and built a dashboard all using python. From what I have read it can be setup as a form, if I could make it private it might allow me to have direct data entry into my source database as well, else I can still use Google Sheets but might implement it for fun.  The dashboard below is embedded so it should be updated as I progress with my code. The code below however is from a one of gist, you don't seem to be able to embed from the github repo, but you can find the latest version of the code here . Apparently the embedding of the code failed so just check out the dashboard for now and I will try and get that working.

Having spent a lot of my time playing with Keboola and dbt to load and transform my data I wanted to have a look at just doing stuff in pure python. I have previously built the fill ETL pipeline for a company in python but haven't really had a need to touch it in over 4 years. Most of the work I did before was just using pandas with a few connectors to various databases and producing reports in Excel using xlwings. It wasn't pretty but it was effective and everyone was happy with the job that it did.  Instead I ended up using the prefect library. Well I built it all and then integrated it into prefect once I found it. I found it ok and it has some useful features bit it is not brilliant but that could be through back of use. It does allow you to produce DAGs and and lots of other useful functionality. Script below. 

I have wanted to load my strava data into my data platform since I started loading the strength data. I found some really useful instructions that I used as by base here . I basically use the procedures shown to load my last 200 strava activities. I load this into MySQL, find the new entries which then get loaded into the main MySQL table and then a bulk load into Snowflake. My next step will be to process this into a more meaningful table using either dbt or seeing if I can do something smart with python and a view in Snowflake.

I decided that I liked doing some of my coding in python, even if I have to manually kick it off at the moment I might go with the safe option of a $5 a month python anywhere package to run on a schedule in the cloud or I could put in as an AWS lambda function or in Azure but I don't want to accidentally rack up a bill so might wait until I am further into training on them.  So in this code I have: Used dotenv to store all parameters and passwords as environment variables so I can post my scrips without modification and store them in git. (with the env file set to gitignore).  Retrieved the values above and called the weather API. Flattened the json to get all the columns. Put the new rows into the table in MySQL.  Retrieved the table from MySQL and done a drop and replace into Snowflake.  My Code:  The table: 

Having pushed the data in MySQL using a Google App script I wanted to see whether I could then push the data to Snowflake without using one of the automated tools. I decided, initially at least, to use python. Python is a very easy language to use and to achieve the basics, for this sort of project at least, you can plug and play with packages that you need. This is not going to be the most performant and probably won't fly in a proper Enterprise environment though I have previously used complex scripts to generate BI reports for the majority of a companies (start up) reporting.  Below is my script minus the creation of the connection engines, because for the purposes of this I did not want to go to the trouble of masking them and it is very well documented how to create them. Currently I am running this manually but for £5 a month I can get this scheduled on pythoanywhere but hoping I will pluck up the courage to run this on free tier Azure. 

I decided that I wanted to ingest some weather data through a different means, this time combining Google API scripts to retrieve the data from the API and another script to connect to the MySQL Database and deposit the data. Both steps are setup on a schedule.  Setting up the API Call:  I followed the instructions from the following medium post to create a function in Google Apps Scripts that would call an API for me. I use it to call the weather API website and retrieve the weather data for where I live.  These 2 things combined import the data into my Google Sheet as per:  I have then set this up to run on a 4 hour schedule within Google Sheets using one of their triggers.  Getting the data into MySQL : So now that I have the data in Google Sheets I want to regularly import this data into a database as it only stores a single row in google sheet, though I could probably get it to persist here as well. Looking at my options with the JDBC drivers available MyS...

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. 

So the next project for me will be to integrate step counts from Google Fit. Given my improved knowledge and understanding of the tools and infrastructure I am using can working out how I am going to do this and use this data before I start.  The first step was connecting to the Google Fit API and extraction the relevant data. I will admit that I did the standard developer trick and followed an online guide / stackoverflow to get this done, my main source was the link attached.  My next steps will be:  Use Keboola to connect and load the Google Sheet as in In Job As an Out job deposit the data into Snowflake.  Use dbt to transform and load the data into the final star schema.  At very least number of k of steps / day would be good to have on in my exercise fact tables. If I integrate this early enough and in enough places it will test a lot of by dbt understanding if nothing else.  As part of this I am going to also create a proper date dimension and integr...

Say you have a massive table but for ease of use for reporting you need to split numbers out. For example say you are a service that provides numerous different services, each person gets a single form with a mark for each service provided and the transactional system stores this a a row per form per service. For reporting you may well want to pivot these out and have a separate columns for each service with a 1 / 0 and a count for each.  In traditional databases and tools you have to create all your views in advanced and you cannot pivot on a list of values. The joy I am finding with dbt and jinja coding is that you can create the views dynamically. And whilst that may pose some risk if means that in this scenario a new service code is catered for automatically as you can dynamically generate the column by looping through a list of values.  I have applied this logic my strength exercise data, pivoting it from rows to columns. Below is the jinja code and the resulting SQL,...

So as part of some stuff I have been doing in my day job I have built some useful and decided I should build a basic function in Snowflake before moving onto something more complicated with table functions and the like. So my basic function is one that accepts parameters and uses this to determine if an activity is +- 1 standard deviation from the average over all time for that activity.  I actually call the code above using dbt to create the views and tables and will show that in my next post. For now here is a screen shot of me calling that function using jinja scripting to create the different function calls. 

One of the tools I am hoping to get to grips with is DBT. It appears to be a very popular tool at the moment. I think with the trend of moving to ELT having a good tool to perform your transformations is important and from what I hear DBT is good.  I have signed up for the free DBT cloud developer account and connected it to my Snowflake instance but after that I am not quite sure what I am meant to be doing. DBT has its own training so I am starting with the dbt fundamentals course. The training is supposed to take several hours with a few more hours implementing the hands on project and gives up a badge for LinkedIn or something. I am more interested in trying out the tool and seeing what it can do, for free, for this project. I have looked into quite a few training courses over the last few months, looking at all the tools I am using for this and things like AWS and when it comes to actually being useful the dbt training is at the top so far. I skipped some as it was basic for s...

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 discussed before how I picked up parkrun data from my e-mails, they don't have an API as their system was never designed to cope with the millions of people that now take part. I only want my own data so this works just fine for me. I use a Zap to pick up the e-mail and plonk it in a Google Sheet and the Keboola to process the data into MySQL and maybe soon Snowflake. Actually given the setup I have it would only take 5 minutes in Keboola to add a step to the Flow to pass the output from the view below and put it into Snowflake as a table. I am leaning more towards using Snowflake as long as Retool stays free enough for me to use as the free MySQL database has a very limited session pool and therefore limits the visualisations I can do.  Anyway the raw data from the e-mail is useless for visuals so I processed the data in MySQL. There might be more elegant solutions but for me it was some experience in how to code this in MySQL and what functions it has. Being primarily used to ...

Really finding Keboola was the thing that kickstarted this project otherwise I would be trying to build custom code on a python cloud server and building everything from scratch.  In Keboola you build you data sources and destinations using connection details which is fairly simple and something I will likely cover in another post, same goes for transformations etc. Here though I am going to discuss Flows, this is where you bring everything together. On my free account there are some limitations.  My easiest flow is very basic:  Pull parkrun results e-mail from Gmail to Google Sheets (actually done by Zap not Keboola).  Keboola will, as often as I like, in this case once a week, pull the data from the sheet into its storage.  It will then transfer this to the target database. Currently I have this setup to be MySQL database but I can and might expand that to the Snowflake instance within Keboola.  I then, outside of Keboola, connect to the MySQL database f...

Snowflake scripting in SQL seems to be in preview and I have decided to have a play with it. Given how new it is there is limited documentation so I am using a combination of what I can find on the Snowflake site and the odd blog that has been written about it. There appear to be a few quirks, at least when compared to Oracle PL/SQL (though that has been round for years). How many of these are intentional and how many are things to be ironed out I don't know. You can see the procedure I have created it:  Accepts an id as a parameter  Creates a result set selecting from a table, using the parameter as a filter Loads the results set into a cursor.  Loops through the cursor loading the id in the cursor into variable Calls procedure passing in the variable as the parameter.  Then as a proof of concept I tried the Snowflake feature of allowing declaration of variables within the main start and end block. 

To continue on from my last post I have kept on playing in Snowflake and am working towards building something that resembles ETL Procedures on Snowflake. Now as this is just something I am messing around with at home it is much more about learning that doing things 100% correctly.  For me the below script was the first time in Snowflake SQL procedure I have:  Used Exception handling  That works and inserts into a log table, now to see if I can log the error message Performed a dynamic insert using data retrieved from one of my own tables.  Whilst these are not earth shattering they are little thing I was not confident on how to do this morning and now I have a working example. I was not confident this morning as I am honestly finding it hard to find real world examples written in Snowflake using their SQL language, all examples seem to be in the Javascript one.  As with my previous post below is the code and a little gif showing the code being called. 

Having not created stored procedures in Snowflake before I wanted to give it a go. My preference is for the more newly released SQL style procedures over the Javascript ones, though I fully intend to give them a stab as well. Below is the code I used to create said my first Snowflake Procedure. This procedure just takes in a table name and returns the count of rows in said table. Not overly useful but for me it has some useful proof of concepts, not only how to create a basic procedure in Snowflake but also how to run dynamic SQL Have a look through the code and feel free to ask any questions Here is proof it works with me running the procedure and it producing the correct result. 

For part of one of my free ETLs I am using Zapps to transfer e-mails from Google Sheets and then Keboola to transfer the sheets into my Snowflake database. I am familiar with string searches and cleansing in Oracle and using python but have not had the chance to do this in Snowflake. I wanted to give it a go as a proof of concept if nothing else. There were some difference in functions between Oracle and Snowflake, no INSTR and using POSITION instead and some difference in working with dates / timestamps but overall it was very similar.  The code below is what I ended up using:  I think want to use this to create some overview graphics to allow me to track the success or failure of my ETLs. Assuming the aspects of Retool remain free you can see how much ETL is going on this link .  In case things aren't working, here is a table of the output I am producing. 

Not much text to put in this one but a comparison between create table scripts in Oracle (my normal), MySQL (did not like) and Snowflake (Was very easy). I think the newer version of MySQL would have been easier to work with but this is what I have to work with on my free instance. The next step of this project is to see how easy it is to build a little package that runs these controls. who knows if I can get it working in MySQL or Snowflake perhaps it can be worked properly into this project with its own dashboards. From the Googling I have done so far I am not optimistic about MySQL but I always have the backup of creating something in Python and seeing if it can work for all 3, you can even get free python web servers (I think) so that might be an option.  Note that for the Oracle code I have already created a basic version of the package.  Oracle Code:   MySQL Code:  Snowflake Code: