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 ...

 Link to the visualisation here :  I have been looking for a tool to use to do free data visualisation on any data source but more recently on Snowflake. Whilst I can use Power BI but I cannot share. So I had a quick look at using the built in snowflake tool. It was very easy to create a couple of graphs off my basic model using a SQL query as the source but make no mistake it is, currently at least, nothing like the major reporting tools out there and cannot replace things like Google Data Studio, OAC or Power BI with very limited options available.