Category: Blog

I’ve been using Medium for the last few years and lately decided post new content there. Feel free to check out my most recent post here:
https://medium.com/@ericfrayer/embracing-the-future-with-generative-ai-more-than-just-ones-and-zeros-b8a64d548f7d

Differential privacy seeks to protect individual data values by adding statistical “noise” to the analysis process. The math involved in adding the noise is complex, but the principle is fairly intuitive – the noise ensures that data aggregations stay statistically consistent with the actual data values allowing for some random variation, but make it impossible to work out the individual values from the aggregated data. In addition, the noise is different for each analysis, so the results are non-deterministic – in other words, two analyses that perform the same aggregation may produce slightly different results.

Understand Differential Privacy!

Recently I decided to move from AWS to Azure for the hosting of my “Sandbox” sites. With the move, I plan to add serve up live interactive data content highlighting different “data” projects of personal and professional interest.

Much of what I’ve worked on is contained on “corporate” portals and intranets. The move to Azure from AWS for “server based” content will allow more flexibility and access to Power BI, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

A took a quick look at the COVID-19 data using Power BI and Qlik Sense. Both have their advantages – but are using the same dataset. A shared table in Snowflake (CT_US_COVID_TESTS).

Yesterday I attended a free workshop put on by Snowflake. The session entitled “Zero to Snowflake in 90 Minutes” provided information on Snowflake’s Architecture, Performance and Scalability as well as a “hands-on” demo. Snowflake touts itself as “The Data Warehouse Built for the Cloud” and is gaining enterprise customers at a dizzying pace.

The “demo” used data from Citi Bike – New York City’s bike share system. Citi Bike is the nations largest bike sharing service. The data can be downloaded from: https://www.citibikenyc.com/system-data

The workshop provides an introduction to how to setup and use Snowflake. The outline is below and the lab takes 90~ minutes:

Lab Overview
Module 1: Prepare Your Lab Environment
Module 2: The Snowflake User Interface & Lab “Story”
Module 3: Preparing to Load Data
Module 4: Loading Data
Module 5: Analytical Queries, Results Cache, Cloning
Module 6: Working With Semi-Structured Data, Views, JOIN
Module 7: Using Time Travel
Module 8: Roles Based Access Controls and Account Admin
Module 9: Data Sharing

I found the workshop very interesting and for two reasons. First, it covered all the basics of using a cloud based database. Users loaded data from a S3 bucket, parsing both csv and json files. Queried the database and managed schema’s and security. The second reason why enjoyed the session is because Qlik’s Elif Tutuk used this dataset for a Qlik Sense Demo app.

I found a copy of the old Qlik Demo app and set it up on a Qlik Sense instance.

I created a ODBC connection (using a DSN) and was able to update the data from Snowflake. The combination of Qlik Sense and Snowflake is compelling. I liked the Snowflake demo especially when I could match it up with the visualizations from Qlik Sense.

This graphic breaks down the a number of key terms and concepts often used interchangeably.

For a number of years I thought Business Intelligence needed people who could “span” both technologies and business understanding. The most valuable BI professionally have both technical knowledge and domain data understanding.

https://bispanner.blogspot.com/