BI Workshop

Data science is a hot topic, and the value of data grows ever faster as companies develop new ways of harnessing its power.

This drives people new to IT to explore this hot topic and how to get into it. Its very easy these days to find an advert for a course online promising to teach you "data centric python in 30 days", "the basics of machine learning in a week" asnd so on. And thats all fine, but not entirely practical if you have no programming experience let alone any data experience, because how do you actually add value to your business? The output of a notebook is one thing, but getting that data into the hands of users is another.

In my time in IT and specifically the data sector, I have never pretended to be a domain expert in any particular data. I guess back at the start in my first 3 years I got pretty good at analysing sales data, but unless I went on to sell insulation that wasn't a great help. Instead I learned how to get data from its source into the hands of those who did know how to analyse the data quicky and efficiently, and most importantally, accurately.

So in this course, we're going to ignore the Notebooks, Machine Learning models and all the "hip stuff" and we're going to delve into the basics and how to quickly learn how to process data, the basics of data warehousing and what tools are available, so that you can get a job in data, without learning how to be a hardcore programmer or maths genius in the process. Of course, if thats the way you want to roll, thats absolutely cool, but there is more than one avenue into this sector and this follows my path.. ish.

  • Wk1: Getting Setup
  • Wk2: Processing data - the basics
  • Wk3: What is a data warehouse?
  • Wk4: Getting data from A to B
  • Wk5: More advanced ETL patterns
  • Wk6: SQL-what?
  • Wk7: Visualisations and getting data to the users
  • Wk8: 50m rows? No you don't need a big data solution. Tuning your datawarehouse.
  • Wk9: Business Intelligence in the Cloud
  • Wk10: Empowering users - Search Engines
  • Wk11: Graph databases - Neo4j
  • Wk12: Building pipelines with Apache Beam