A data dictionary is a document that assists you in navigating your team's mountain of data. We show you how to create a spreadsheet-based data dictionary with Excel and dbdiagram.io.
Why is Text-to-SQL so hard? Why is there a need for it? What are its challenges? Is there a way to make it easier?
What does the future of self-service business intelligence look like?
What self-service analytics is, and why it is important. Explained using a story of a pizza restaurant. If you enjoyed this comic …
We’re introducing a simpler, faster way to explore data in Holistics: you just need to chat with Holistics AI.
Tableau is a great data visualization tool to help data teams provide senior executives with summarized data. However, there is typically lots …
Have you ever played table tennis? Imagine you’re a recreational table tennis player. You’re not great, but you’re not …
Canal aims to provide much better performance, maintainability, and scalability throughout Holistics querying operations.
Numbers aren't all created equal; they fall into four distinct categories known as data scales. Understanding this, you'll learn how to handle each type correctly to make your data work for you.
Automatically pick the most optimal aggregated tables per each query for maximal query performance.
Turn rigid dashboards into living documents, rich with interactivity, business context, and storytelling.
The industry seems split on what "self-service analytics means". Benn Stancil suggests it's more of a "feeling, …
For this week’s episode of Designing Data Organizations, we spoke with Christine Jiang, former Director of Core Analytics at Vimeo, who was with the organization between 2020 and 2024.
Designing Data Organizations is brought to you by Holistics, where we delve into the intricate process of creating and optimizing data teams within organizations.
If you have dabbled in the Software Engineering world, you may think this post is about the catchphrase: “Composition over Inheritance” and …
A concise tour of one of the basic components of Kimball dimensional data modeling. We explore the three types of fact tables, and then analyze why they have lasted the test of time.
Designing Data Organizations is brought to you by Holistics, where we delve into the intricate process of creating and optimizing data teams within organizations.
How did Analytics-as-Code evolve? We explain the history behind the movement, and present the 4 levels of analytics as code over the years.
Designing Data Organizations is brought to you by Holistics, where we delve into the intricate process of creating and optimizing data teams within organizations.
As of this article’s publication, over 15,000 data and analytics professionals have been laid off since January 2022.* The job …
Are dashboards really 'dead'? A response to a vendor trend that seems rather premature.
Treating your dashboards like a product means thinking about ALL of your user's needs — rational or otherwise.
10 practical tips/strategies I extracted myself when doing analytics case study as part of job interview process.
In actual business conversations, the metric's form is sometimes ignored and implicitly understood. Understanding this concept gives you much better clarity in dealing with metrics.
Why are so few data analysts get good at business problem-solving?
Building a career in data often means building a career in a business cost center. This isn't necessarily bad. Here's how to think about it.
Introduction A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced a new data analytics product called Fabric. One of Fabric’s most exciting features is …
Holistics.io the self-service BI platform, announced that it has achieved Select Tier partner status as part of the Snowflake Partner Network
Most data practitioners I talked to agree on two things. * We need an abstraction layer to define metrics consistently and rigorously. * We …
As a provider of business intelligence software, we understand the importance of maintaining the highest standards of security and trust. Our customers …
Data clinic is one of many ways you create value and drive your organization toward better data literacy. Here's how.
As data analysts, we often do lots of work — writing SQL, modeling data, drawing charts, and building data presentations. We spent hours …
Investment analyst is an entry-level investment position. So is data analyst an entry-level data position, too?
What are the typical metrics that you’d normally look at weekly? If you're like me (a startup founder), you …
This is part two of the “Silos of Data Organization” series. Part one was sent out last week. For this one, let’ …
As a Data Analyst, you usually work with two types of stakeholders: the clients (business users) who ask for data, and the …
A short story about my history with programmatic configuration (or lack thereof) and how it's related to analytics.
We understand that things are getting tougher and tougher during this pandemic but we will not wave the white flag right now. …
The definitive explainer for OLAP cubes, where we cover every single possible definition for the phrase.
Ralph Kimball's classic book The Data Warehouse Toolkit introduce the world to the practice of data modeling. Here's how to read it in 2022.
A hack for when you don't understand data jargon.
We take a look at an exhaustive list of reasons people give when they want to ignore anomalous data.
How a data person might fit into your company's learning cadence, and what that means for company performance.
The origins and intuition behind a famous SaaS business metric.
For the past two months, we've been shipping some great features to improve your experience and interactivity inside Holistics.
Why Amazon's notion of measuring controllable input metrics is a lot more profound than you might think.
How Amazon uses metrics. A summary of chapter 6 of Working Backwards, the first book to explain how Amazon really works.
Simple data people tricks, a hierarchy of feature stores, and Shreyas Doshi on product metrics.
How Amazon uses input metrics, a data pipeline is a materialized view, and the case against self-service data and analytics.
A quick look at what Snowflake's been up to re: the Data Lakehouse, an inside look at Amazon's data-driven decision making, and how Airbnb customized Superset to fit their needs.
We've shipped 2 new features in January 2021: Bulk actions and Top/Bottom N filters.
The data lakehouse is a thing, Superset is also a thing, and how to make dashboards using a product thinking approach.
Looking for an analytics engineering job in your locale? Read this.
Everything we know and don't yet know about the emerging role of analytics engineering.
Three changes in the data landscape we're investigating over the next few months.
2020 has been a really tough period for people around the world due to COVID-19. Regardless, Here at Holistics, we continue to …
Five quick things we know to be true, written for the end of the year.
Every cool data project has some schlep up front. Here's why it's a good idea to keep that in mind.
Another festive season is coming! If you haven’t got any plan for the upcoming holidays, here’s our little suggestion: Explore Holistics’ newest features and improvements.
Conversion Funnel has been with Holistics since the first day, but it never got the attention that matches its importance. That' …
In our third and final part on Agile Data Warehouse, we take a look at the origins of the Agile Manifesto, from which Corr and Stagnitto took inspiration.
The second part of our series on Agile Data Warehouse Design, a 2011 attempt at applying the principles of agile to the practice of data modeling.
Agile Data Warehouse Design is a 2011 attempt at applying the principles of agile to the practice of data modeling. This is the first post in a series on the ideas from the book.
We've shipped 3 new features this month: Metric Sheet, Point Map and Adhoc Export.
Goodhart's law says that 'when a measure becomes a target, it fails to become a good measure. Here are four ways that occurs.
A short story about SQL's better rival: Michael Stonebraker's storied query language, QUEL.
Stuck at home during the pandemic? We give you Holistics's top five data books to read in 2020.
Why does data analytics and business intelligence lag behind the best practices and tooling of software? Two anecdotes and a theory.
What we can learn from Softwar, a book about Larry Ellison's attempt to take over the enterprise software world.
What intermix.io's forced acquisition tells us about the two philosophies of cost in data analytics.
Holistics was ranked one of the top 3 data analysis tools globally by Gartner's FrontRunners 2020 report, in terms of Customer Satisfaction. Only 20 out of 176 software products considered were selected for this list.
A look into metadata hubs, which might just be the hottest category of data tools of the past two years.
We take a look at the business fundamentals of the operations stage — the last of three stages in a company's life.
The scale stage is the second of three stages in a startup's life. In this post, we discuss what product-market fit means, and then we look at healthy growth (the kind that leads to winning) and unhealthy growth (the kind that leads to company death).
This is one of the #lifeatholistics stories written by our Intern graduate.
Redash is a good, popular open-source SQL-based BI tool that can be installed easily on local environment to get a simple SQL-to-chart functionality going. Yet as your analytics needs grow, you might face some pain points when using Redash
In this article, we will demonstrate how to use the JSON_EXTRACT and JSON_TABLE functions in MySQL8.0 to convert JSON table into tabular data for analysis and reports, and also how to utilise it in Holistics for drag-and-drop reports.
A startup's first job is to create a customer. We take a closer look at how that affects the metrics you measure at the product stage of a startup's lifecycle.
When your company grows, the metrics that matter changes along with it. Here's a look at the three growth stages of every company, along with the metrics that matter most at each stage.
One way to get better at business communication is to learn the fundamentals of business. We explain Return on Invested Capital from first principles, written with the data analyst in mind.
Working with nested JSON data in BigQuery analytics database might be confusing for people new to BigQuery. Yet if done well, nested …
If you work in data analytics, communicating complex information is just part of your job. Here's how to use the Ladder of Inference to get better at it.
We've shipped 3 new features this month: AWS for Holistics 3.0, New Navigation Bar, Better Relationship Display
We're releasing The Analytics Setup Guidebook, a first-principles approach to data analytics. Get it free today!
Discover our new and May-verllous features: Data drill-through, Smart date parser, Filter suggestions, and more!
Learn how to leverage data to craft personalized messages to your customers, pinpoint your business' Achilles heel and take timely actions!
Why data quality is an ongoing, people, process, and tools problem, and how to think about getting better at it.
Smart Date Parser allows users to input date/time expressions that are more natural/closer to your day-to-day language, and output date/time values that adhere to programming language's standards.
This tutorial will show you simple steps to build an interactive dashboard to visualize your Pipedrive data using Holistics.
I'll show you 5 simple steps to integrate CSV / Google Sheets and build a real time dashboard by using Holistics.
What a new approach to slowly changing dimensions tell us about the future of dimensional data modeling.
Why maturity models can be a bad idea, and why using a capability model is a better idea for digital transformation.
Tracking the performance of your software development team is really, really difficult. The 2018 book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps gives us a fantastic way to measure just that. Here's how.
Why your CEO is so obsessed with cash flow metrics, and what you can do to help as an analytics person in your company.
This is one of the #lifeatholistics stories written by our Intern graduate.
There appears to be two philosophies today when it comes to managing costs in a modern data stack. We explore what they are.
Creative designer intern Teo shares his experiences working at Holistics Indonesia.
An explanation of the SaaS Quick Ratio that focuses on the intuition behind the metric. Written with the data analyst in mind.
There's a tendency for people to conflate OLAP with OLAP cube. We take a quick look at how this happens, why it shouldn't, and why it matters if you're a data practitioner.
A definitive history of the rise of the OLAP cube, how it's affected our industry, and what comes after.