Category: Data & Analytics
How To Connect Power BI to Read-only Replica of Azure SQL Database & More
March 18, 2020
by Nate Wang, Consultant – Altis Melbourne Using both Azure SQL Database and Power BI as Business Intelligence tools in your company? Then this easy, but often neglected, functionality might help you supercharge your reports’ performance with no additional cost. Sounds good? Read on! This blog post will cover: The background What is the Azure …
Tech Leadership
March 4, 2020
by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney I frequently engage with clients as a Tech Lead. My habit is to always clarify what is expected from me so that I am set up for success. Now the beauty to the role is that it is extremely flexible and broad, so not surprisingly so is …
The Importance of Data Governance
February 26, 2020
by Mythili Baker, Head of Innovation – Altis Sydney After attending the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney last week it’s clear that data governance isn’t going anywhere and it’s still a major challenge for organisations. The first main theme behind this I see is the growth of self-service. Tools such as Tableau, Qlik …
Hindsight Bias and IT Projects
February 19, 2020
by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney ‘Understanding of a situation or event only after it has happened or developed.’ So why would we bother writing a blog about this, how can we understand something before it happens? My thoughts are not related to the order in which we do things, I am going to …
Top 10 Blog Posts In 2019 Written by Our Altis Community
February 12, 2020
By Mik Panchal, Managing Consultant – Altis Sydney As we welcome 2020, we want to take the time to celebrate our top stories from 2019 and thank our Altis community for the great content. Here are some of our success stories & how we have helped our customers achieve tangible business outcomes. Using Machine Learning …
Google Earth & Satellite Data
February 5, 2020
by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney Google Earth and the accompanying Earth Engine are a fantastic source of satellite data. Before starting, it will help to understand a little about satellite data and how it is shared. Firstly there are many satellites that are available to the public, a few examples include: European Space …
Learning About Project Delivery From a Chef
January 22, 2020
by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney I have the pleasure of working with a colleague who was a professional chef. He is humorous and keen to share his experiences with those of us who have time to chat. One day, we were discussing the latest reality show that involves chefs and young aspiring …
Data on the Balance Sheet
January 15, 2020
Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney Let’s agree that the cliche of ‘data is an asset’ is not disputed, the question is really, how much of an asset. Before we go too far, some ground rules: The terms Data and Information are used interchangeably as is the case in general conversation, particularly with non-IT …
Data Visualisation Tips – Bullet Chart, an alternate to Gauge Chart
December 20, 2019
Mik Panchal, Managing Consultant – Altis Sydney Are you working on a dashboard containing Actuals vs. Budget KPIs? This post will discuss the use of a Bullet chart as an alternative to a Gauge chart by looking at the good and not-so-good aspects of each approach. Gauge Charts Gauge charts look great, but how effective …
Should we invest more time getting data into a Data Warehouse (DW) or analysing the data to create insights for the business?
December 12, 2019
Mik Panchal, Managing Consultant – Altis Sydney Are you implementing an Analytics solution using Azure and Power BI? Mik Panchal, our Sydney Managing Consultant, shares our recent success story using Microsoft Cloud infrastructure. This post will walk you through the benefits of using our Azure Framework and Power BI to provide robust self-service capabilities to …
Cost-effective XML storage and querying at scale
October 31, 2019
by Aleck Kulabukhov, Managing Consultant Sydney Introduction XML parsing is a compute-expensive exercise. XML is quite a popular way to store unstructured data so we often face a “Big XML Dilemma” – we can either: pre-parse XML, extract the required fields and store them in a most efficient and fast-to-query way (such as Data …
How to customise the axis in Power BI
September 4, 2019
by Phoebe Parker – Consultant, Altis Melbourne Recently, a client asked if it was possible to customise the axis on a line graph in Power BI, as there was no option for it in any menus. We did not want to change the chart type, as it was still the best way to visualise …
Tired of the hidden costs and limitations of your current RDBMS for Data & Analytics workloads?
July 24, 2019
Richard Roose, NSW Delivery Lead shares his views on where Snowflake fits into a Data and Analytics architecture. Whilst RDBMS’s have long been used for traditional transactional workloads (OLTP), the focus of this discussion is on their use for Data & Analytics workloads (OLAP). In a world of on-premise vs. on-premise cloud vs. …
Join the “tour de force” of AWS and Snowflake
July 18, 2019
To Data Lake, Data Hub, Data Warehouse is not the question. Which cloud platform to put your Snowflake instance on is the question – talk to Altis about the answer. For those contemplating re-architecting or greenfields data lakes/data hubs/data warehouses in a cloud environment, talk to Altis about why you should be considering the “tour …
I have Power BI, do I need a data warehouse?
June 5, 2019
By Kent Teague, Managing Consultant, Melbourne With the rapid spread of data visualisation tools like Power BI and Tableau, often outside of IT, Altis is commonly asked: is the data warehouse dead? Can’t I just grab the data and create my own reports? This article will talk to the continued importance of understanding the business …
Snowflake released on Azure in Australia!
May 30, 2019
by Dawie Kruger, Microsoft Azure Practice Lead It was great to attend the launch of Snowflake on Azure. Having implemented the Snowflake solution on AWS for more than 6 clients, it is great to see the addition of the Microsoft Azure infrastructure. For those of you wondering what Azure services are being utilized here is …
Passing GCP’s Professional Cloud Architect exam
May 14, 2019
By Margaret Chan – GCP Practice Lead, New Zealand Altis recently launched our new cloud practice focused on Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) and as the NZ GCP Practice Lead I recently sat the Professional Cloud Architect exam. In this blog I will share my learnings and thoughts through the certification journey. Hopefully this will be …
Managing self-service BI teams
April 2, 2019
By Katrina Pilcher, RM and Mythili Baker, Head of Innovation Growth in the adoption of self-service BI tools and increasing data literacy across organisations is leading to an increase in the number of individuals across the business who want to and who have access to be able to perform their own analytics. …
Putting together a roadmap to guide your Data & Analytics journey
February 26, 2019
By Chris Kearns, Regional Manager, Altis UK Consider the following four scenarios and ask yourself which is closest to your organisation: Scenario 1: Your organisation relies on an army of people to manually create a mountain of spreadsheets/PowerPoint slides to provide information to support decision making. Different people create similar siloed reports that don’t …