Category: Data Resources & Tips
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Connecting Snowflake to Esri Coming Soon
Earlier this year, I wrote a brief post about how to connect Snowflake to Esri’s ArcGIS. That worked for version 10.4. When we upgraded to 10.7, the ODBC connection appeared to connect to Snowflake but wouldn’t actually retrieve any data. Today, I finally was able to connect w/ some Esri folks to learn about their…
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Choose your names wisely
Tip: Avoid using reserved words as object names. The other day, I chose a name for a schema in SQL Server that had some unintended consequences. I had created some audit tables to track historical changes and named the schema “audit”. It didn’t occur to me that “audit” is a SQL Server reserved word. I…
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A Bird’s Eye View of Data Migration
Data migration can be incredibly daunting. Finding a home for every field, pixel, and document in a new system is like moving between libraries that have completely different classification systems. Or like helping an elderly relative move out of their decades-long home and downsize into a new apartment. Often it feels like being caught up…
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How does your vote count in the Electoral College based on where you live?
This article is a collaboration with my daughter, Meghan Bailey. Each state gets an allotment of electoral college votes based on their population. States with a higher population get more electoral votes such as Texas’ 38 (based on July 2019 estimated population of just under 29 million). Those states with a smaller population are allotted…
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Catfishing Data
The above graph was on the Georgia Department of Public Health site and it shows the top 5 counties with the greatest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. At first glance, it appears that their case counts have been on the decline. That’s great news! Except that it’s not quite correct. Look closely and you’ll see…
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Connecting Snowflake to Esri’s ArcGIS
I’m transitioning our data warehouse from on-premise SQL Server to Snowflake. I have a GIS team that uses Esri products and we needed to be able to ensure that ArcGIS could connect to Snowflake. So this is just a quick little How To. Within your Snowflake instance, you’ll need to go the Help menu and…
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Tableau join with calculated field
I recently ran into a problem with a join: I had two tables with “customer class” IDs in them, but I needed the description – which was only available for the customer subclass. In a rush, I joined the tables on customer class and filtered the subclass descriptions to one description per customer class. I…
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Perspective
Today, President Trump tweeted out an image of a map with county shapes that looked Republican red. I was curious where this map originated from. There was an article back in 2016 by the Washington Post that provided some perspective. This was by county, the 2016 election results. However, the FLAT red county level map doesn’t…
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Tableau Quick Tip: Show ALL Labels
I was trying to play with the hex map concept. But I noticed my state abbreviations were only showing up on a handful of my marks. I discovered that you can simply click on Label in the Marks card and select “Allow labels to overlap other marks”: And boom! All labels are now on display.
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Road Trip with Google Maps
My daughter got accepted to a summer program at MIT for women in engineering. So we thought since we’ll already be on the east coast, why not extend the trip into exploring colleges in the Northeast. Now, being from the Pacific Northwest, my geography skills for anything east of the Rockies starts to get a…
BI Over Beers 