Lateral Thinking in Games and Data
Or, What Nintendo’s Game Boy has to do with Analytics Back before the success of the Nintendo Switch or the motion-controller craze of the Nintendo Wii, there was a device that encapsulated a central driving philosophy of Nintendo and was key to its long-term success in the video game industry. Like other elementary-aged kids of […]
Mutation Testing: An Unknown Known Solution in Software Development
We All Suck at Something I want to let you in on a journey I’ve been on lately, just in case it can be as profound for you as it has been for me. Picture this: You’ve been in auto racing for decades. You were self-taught in the beginning, quickly won several big races, led […]
Hardening Snowflake Security with Network Rules and Policies
An important step towards ensuring the security of your Snowflake account(s) is the appropriate use of network rules and policies to prevent unauthorised access. These policies are leveraged to ensure that access is only allowed through restricted methods and to/from exclusive sources. Without this protection, you have one less wall to prevent potential bad actors […]
A Use Case for Rank Dense in Tableau
Oftentimes, I find myself in training or enablement sessions, showing the full list of possible functions available to use in Tableau. It’s quite a list of possibilities that starts with ABS (for the absolute value of an integer) and runs through the ZN (zero null function) — they run alphabetically top to bottom from the […]
InterWorks Blog Roundup — August 2024
Welcome, dear readers, to the August 2024 Blog Roundup. Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, kids are back and school and the heat of the summer has finally broken. Fall’s on the horizon (until Indian Summer shows up in a week or two and we’re all sweating again…) First, my usual music recommendations, then on […]
How to Use MIN_BY / MAX_BY in Snowflake
If you are familiar with SQL, you would be familiar with the concept of aggregate functions. For those who are still a bit fuzzy on what these aggregate functions intend to do, here’s a quick couple of quick examples: When you want to find the total sales of all the product categories in your sales […]
Concurrency with Unlimited Scale in Matillion’s Data Productivity Cloud
Ever found yourself stuck in development limbo, waiting for a job to finish, only to realize you might need to tweak it again? It’s one of the less enjoyable parts of being a data engineer. But what if I told you there’s a way to speed things up and make your life easier? The answer […]
Being the Exception
“If you want an exceptional outcome, you must be willing to be the exception.” wrote Sam Presti, the General Manager of the Oklahoma City Thunder. It was the summer of 2019 in an article penned to fans after trading away franchise cornerstones Russell Westbrook and Paul George. Everybody knew the team was going from a […]
Demystifying Variables in Matillion DPC
Variables are a fundamental part of all programming languages, giving developers a flexible object in which they can store, update and retrieve data. What makes them extra useful in DPC is that the value of a variable can be set and updated using Python, the Update Scalar component or via a Grid Iterator that cycles […]
Maturing Analytics: The Road to AI
Welcome back to our journey in maturing analytics. We’ve gone from identifying the actual job to be done to many of the methods and tools you’ll use to deliver on it. In this final installment, we’re going to tackle the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence and what it means to this whole process. If […]
