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> And if you ask why it’s often because they couldn’t find the answer to their incredibly specific one-time only question, so they decided it’s all useless and

> And if you ask why it’s often because they couldn’t find the answer to their incredibly specific one-time only question, so they decided it’s all useless and they continue to work on their own personal homegrown BI-suite in excel. Hah this is probably me. The university I work for uses a BI tool (MicroStrategy) to track students/majors/etc. But I usually find it easier to use the BI tool primarily as a way to get a CSV or XLS export of enough source data to answer my question, and then do the actual analysis in Python+pandas. I can probably formulate my query in their weird proprietary query builder, but it seems unnecessarily complicated and I already know how to do data analysis in Python.

perl4ever 5y ago
>their weird proprietary query builder If you're talking about Power Query, the best way to use it is to write code directly once you observe what the interface generates. It's a rather nice kind-of-functional language that really comes into its own when you start using/creating higher order functions. Power Query gave me an intense craving for a form of SQL with a similar facility for functions. For example, I have a lot of experience writing Oracle SQL, and Power Query didn't offer "grouping sets". But I realized it could be implemented using functions. It would be so great if SQL supported that.