Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by R_haterade 3131 days ago
>its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.

<rant>

You wanna know what's even more useful? Code notebooks.

I store everything from my sql queries to my processing pipeline to my models, and my vizualizations. Most notebooks have slide-show modes now so your presentation to business stakeholders is simple to prepare as well, and with the right plotting packages you can draw interactive charts that do all the fancy stuff. And when it's time to update the analysis, you just re-run the notebook.

But business analysts are too freaking lazy to just learn to write some python or R, and they're perfectly happy to get paid to do the same task over and over again when it comes time to making updates.

And don't get me started on source control.

</rant>

4 comments

Most business analysts who are pulling this kind of data have a finance background. To say that they're "too lazy" because they don't want to do their work using Python seems a bit harsh.

In practice what I've seen is that IT and finance departments don't even let business analysts write their own SQL queries for fear that they'll write bad ones that bring the database server to its knees.

>In practice what I've seen is that IT and finance departments don't even let business analysts write their own SQL queries for fear that they'll write bad ones that bring the database server to its knees

I'll take data warehouses for 600, Alex.

I use jupyter a good amount, but even in a low user environment there's a big worry about version control and code sharing/review

I know there's " automatically check stuff into git" sort of models but would really like an integrated Jupyter + GitHub + Google Drive system so that it's easier to track what's happening and to find older versions of stuff.

Oh yes. I have tried to introduce jupyter notebooks with pandas to data analysts so many times, but they always want to do it in excel.
Do you have any way you'd recommend of getting multiple users working together with code notebooks? I've messed around with Jupyter, but that's about it.
We usually just send .ipynb files around because of the stuff we do, we all usually have the same libraries.

Installing a notebook server is an option though. IBM will be happy to let you pay to have them help, or you can do it the sane way with continuum analytics.