It’s exactly 10 years since my first day at Google. What I’ve learnt:
- In 2011 there was a career path for me, but I had to leave Chile to find it.
- There is a career path outside management: At Google I discovered that software engineers could keep moving forward without the need to become a manager.
- There are jobs that combine passions with skills: I wasn’t the best SWE at Google, but someone saw my passions and skills, and invited me to join Developer Relations.
- Know your strengths: Taking the Clifton StrengthsFinder test changed how I viewed myself. …
Car rental rates are surprisingly high — and I have the data to prove it. In this post learn where to find all this data and how to analyze it with SQL, thanks to QL2 and Snowflake.
Have you tried renting a car lately? The rates are surprisingly high. And I have the data to prove it:
Each of these lines represents the average quoted price for car rentals in LA, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago, and San Francisco — starting in 2019, and ending in record high prices right now.
The highlight of this story is having access to all this data, and wondering what else you could do with it. …
By creating a Snowflake external function we can get predictions out of Facebook Prophet for any time series. Learn how to easily integrate these forecasts into your SQL pipelines — with Snowflake connecting to Prophet running on a Docker container inside Google Cloud Run.
The goal for this post is to build a function you could use within Snowflake to forecast time series. A great open source tool for this is Facebook Prophet, and we just need a way to use it within our Snowflake environment. This is easy, with Snowflake’s ability to run external functions — hence we only need to host an instance of Prophet and add the necessary plumbing to end up with a prophetize(timeseries) function within Snowflake.
Let’s start with a demo, any time series in Snowflake will do: For example, the temperature around New York City in the Newark…
Your customers trust you to protect their privacy and identities — and Snowflake makes this easy with Dynamic Data Masks. With this you can get rid of complex systems of secure views or copies of data: Just create policies that allow everyone to share the same tables and queries, while protecting sensitive data.
Let’s say your customers are superheroes, and you have a table that contains data about them. You know a lot about your customers, and they trust you to protect their identities and privacy — not only from third parties, but also from people in your company that need this data to do their job, but not all of this:
There’s plenty of research establishing that boards should refresh their members regularly. Let’s see the numbers for the Free Software Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, Python Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative.
Rotation in open source boards: Average # of years served by members
The ASF, PSF, and OSI keep renewing their board members. On average each member serves less than 8 years.
Meanwhile the FSF average # of years served per board members keeps growing — currently >13.83 years. Or more, if the count started before 2001.
Why boards should rotate
The following research articles show why institutions need to keep boards fresh, regardless if they are non-profit or not:
Rotating new board directors into the boardroom and on committees prevents the board from becoming stale. The IRS favors term limits because they believe that static board membership leads to unhealthy attitudes, which can cause boards to…
Eva’s challenge: Produce a new daily visualization with Snowflake and Tableau for 30 days. Let’s check on her progress during her first week of this ongoing challenge.
Eva Murray is a Tableau Zen master and a leader for #MakeOverMonday — and she just joined Snowflake! She loves data storytelling, and when she found thousands of datasets in the Snowflake Data Marketplace — she decided to take this challenge. We taped a call discussing her first 7 days of visualizations — and you can find it here:
Let’s check some of her visualizations and my thoughts:
The visualizations
SQL is a great tool, but it can’t do everything. For example, figuring out a way to analyze funnels and sessions with SQL is truly difficult — until now. Let’s discover the power of MATCH_RECOGNIZE(), by analyzing a Google Analytics e-commerce funnel with Snowflake.
Check TJ Murphy’s reaction when he discovered that Snowflake now has support for MATCH_RECOGNIZE:
Sample use case: Google Analytics e-commerce funnel with Snowflake
How would you answer this funnel question with SQL:
“We have an e-commerce shop. We need to identify sessions that land into the website from an arbitrary referrer (Instagram, Facebook, etc), and that end up buying something. How many steps did it take for these users to buy something, and how many times they tried to pay before success?”
That’s not an easy question to answer with plain SQL. But MATCH_RECOGNIZE finally gives us an elegant way to find answers to question like this one.
With MATCH_RECOGNIZE we can simply define the steps we…
The Foursquare Places dataset covers more than 96 million places around the world — including interesting fields like the popularity of each one. In this post we’ll explore the dataset and highlight some of its possibilities.
This is a map that shows the most popular type of restaurant for each state around the US, and the pattern is clear — states around the East love pizza, states around the West love Mexican food:
But there are some exceptions:
- Idaho in the West prefers pizza.
- Louisiana in the South is all about cajun food.
- And Maine in the Northeast loves seafood.
To build this map I used the Foursquare Places premium dataset, through the Snowflake Data Marketplace. You can find my queries below.
This dataset includes more than 96 million places from all over…
Starschema shares COVID-19 tracking data in the Snowflake Data Marketplace, including vaccination numbers from JHU and Our World in Data. Find here the basic SQL queries to use this data in your projects.
World ranking
2021–03–11: Few countries have vaccinated more than 4% of their population. Gibraltar and Israel display outstanding numbers at almost 50%. They are followed by Seychelles (27%), Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Bahrain, USA, Serbia, Malta, Faeroe Islands, and Chile (6.64%).
What’s interesting about this query:
- Source is Our World in Data, and Starschema loads and shares this data in Snowflake.
- The
owid_vaccinationstable reports interesting statistics like # of daily vaccinations, % of population vaccinated, and the specific vaccines each country is using. - To get only the latest day of data we use the
qualify row_number()=1instruction. This is especially important…
The Snowflake Data Marketplace Challenge is open. To win you need to come up with a creative answer to a question, by using data from the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Find here a highlight of the Knoema datasets in Snowflake, then join us in the challenge.
There are four questions that you could answer, each focusing on a different industry: financial services, healthcare, media & entertainment, and retail/CPG. For example, one of the questions is
“As a financial planner, your client has received a stipend of $1 million and has asked you to help them invest in foreign currency. Which currency would you choose and why?”
To answer this question, you should go to your Snowflake account (sign up for a free trial), and explore these Knoema datasets.
Knoema has collected thousands of different public datasets — and you can access them for free in…
Felipe Hoffa
Data Cloud Advocate at Snowflake ❄️. Originally from Chile, now in San Francisco and around the world. Previously at Google. Let’s talk data.
