On one of our webinars in April 2020 we talked about the developer portal and how our developer community are pushing the Keboola Connection platform into places that often surprise our own core team. Our partners often are the creative ones, adding their knowledge and expertise to expand our platform in service of our shared customers and their varying needs. This is a guest post, written by Johnathan Brook, Solutions Architect at 4 Mile Analytics.

Companies use predictive and business analytics to gain an advantage over their competitors and claim a bigger share of the market. But with the accelerated proliferation of data volume, speed and variety, establishing a system to make sense of this data is posing ever-increasing challenges. Several data solutions - from databases to data lakes - have emerged to empower companies of all sizes to take over their data and use it to accelerate growth.

Bonus Material: PostgreSQL vs MySQL complete comparison table ‍ PostgreSQL (or Postgres) and MySQL are both relational database management systems (RDBMS for short). They are complex technological inventions designed to simplify your data operations across a wide variety of business use cases. The “relational” part of the name refers to the way in which they structure data as relations between rows and columns.

While digging through data, Anna spots an interesting trend - some customers buy 3 times more than others. A segment of super-high spenders? This could make it rain for the company! She rushes to her boss, to show them the data, only to hear: “Yeah, I know. We have a bug, which inserts every order three times in the database. Were you not paying attention during our daily meeting?” Aw-kward.

Being data-driven is the holy grail of modern business. It allows you to grow 8x faster than your competition, boosts your company’s net earnings by 30% and will have VCs throwing money at you if your organization relies on AI. So, what strategy does one use to become data-driven? Well, it’s actually quite simple: If you follow this recipe to the T, you can have your data cake and eat it.

Every time you write another piece of code that picks up data from an FTP server, a small piece of you dies. As a developer in the data space, you know what we’re talking about. 80% of your time can be taken by building and improving the environment and tools, maintenance tasks, and pieces of functionality. That's simply too much time dedicated away from tackling more important issues.

ETL tools help companies to streamline and enhance their data operations. They automate the repetitive tasks involved in extracting raw data from sources, transforming data into a consumable format and loading into data warehouses, where it is ready to be analyzed. With so many offerings available to you, all of which do the heavy lifting ‘out of the box’, it is hard to discern which ETL tool is best suited to your needs.

Following the wave of COVID-19-related responses, the hospitality business has taken an unimaginable hit. Whether it’s the widespread fear of being infected, government-enforced shutdown or the implementation of social distancing, businesses in the hospitality industry are witnessing the decimation of their finances. In the space of just a few weeks, food traffic has fallen by 50%.

The advantages of remote work have been praised for a while now. Team members gravitate towards the flexible work schedule and enjoy an increase in personal freedom, while companies benefit from a talent pool unencumbered by geographical borders. From remote-first tech giants like Automattic (which powers a third of the internet), to newbies such as NASA, companies are steadily progressing towards telecommuting. But working from home comes with its own unique set of challenges.

The Shoemaker (often) goes barefoot. It is often the case, that while one is working hard on helping their customers get better, they neglect their own processes, taking the same shortcuts they warn their clients against. It was like that at Keboola a few years back, until we agreed that this is no longer acceptable, and created a job role (mine) to apply our teachings internally as well.