Welcome to the second episode of our Business Intelligence series, brought to you by Late Night Brew! Today’s guest, Brian Gilligan, joins our host Robert Buktenica once again to take a look at how business intelligence tools have evolved over the years—from Excel to advanced platforms like Power BI and Tableau which take our data analytics to the next level.
Grab your choice of brew and hang out with us as we unravel the history of business intelligence tools.
TIMESTAMP
00:07 – Introduction
00:40 – The Brew
01:25 – What were the original BI tools?
03:03 – What BI tools are available today?
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Robert Buktenica: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Late Night Brew, where we talk the brews first, and then we get around to what we’re supposed to afterwards. As always, I’m your host, Robert Buktenica, and joining with me today, is Brian Gilligan. Brian, welcome back, buddy.
Brian: Hello, nice to see everybody.
The Brew
Robert: We are continuing the second of the series, you’ll get more comfortable, I promise. Diving into the tools surrounding the data analysis, data transformation that we’ve been talking about. However, first, the important things, Brian, what brew are you having with me?
Brian: All right, today I have a beer called Juicy Banger, from a place called Blackman’s Brewery, which is a local brewery here in Australia, where they have great food and great beer.
Robert: Hey, there you go. I’ve got a Bruja Brew, it’s an IPA. It’s actually brewed with cactus water, it’s interesting.
Brian: It’s good?
Robert: Yes, it is good, it’s from a brewery in Texas. You don’t know what to expect, right, cactus water. You’re like, “What am I going to taste?” It tastes like beer. Into it now, what were the original tools that were used to really do this kind of work?
What were the original BI tools?
Brian: Well, that’s a really good question. From my perspective, I think things fall into– I almost look at like two schools. In the one school, you have folks like me who are more business focused and using Excel. They are using some spreadsheets, pivot tables, anything Excel, you know, you’re the expert, the guru there.
And then the other side of it, I kind of look at it is those folks that are the data engineers, those folks that are data scientists and things like that. They’re really more focused on using data warehouses. They’re very used to working with program languages like SQL, where they’re just taking tons of data and they’re crunching it using a program language like SQL.
Robert: Awesome. I remember learning reporting for the first time. It was like I figured out pivot tables and I thought it was the most powerful cool thing in the world, and I still managed to, “Check it out, this is like the high summary of it.” “Oh, how’d you do that?” “It’s the table, just here, you know.”
What BI tools are available today?
Robert: Now, it’s been many, many years as we’ve both been in the tech game. Tools have evolved. What is available now that you use to do what you do?
Brian: I would say, you know, I was thinking about this question. Over the last five to ten years, this space has really blown up, it’s just incredible. Today, you probably still have people who are still working in Excel and still using a lot of data warehousing and stuff.
But the advent of the BI tools, and the ones we work with are tools like power BI, Tableau and Click, these are tools that are common now. But what they’re really been able to do is really take that business intelligence which is kind of manual and rudimentary, and now, over the last few years, it’s just become so much more sophisticated. It’s really bringing both of those worlds, in a sense, together.
All these tools, you can—if you’re from Excel, and you’re using, say, power BI, it’s like Excel on steroids. It’s awesome. But if you’re also from, like you’re used to doing SQL, you could still do a lot of those same transformations and all that stuff, and bring you to Power BI or Tableau, and be able to visualise it with your BI tools.
It’s just incredible, and I think the time that we’re living right now—it used to be a couple of years ago, you could connect to a couple of dozen types of data sources. Today, it’s hundreds. I mean, everything from the internet, from the web, to a data warehouse. I mean, you pretty much name it, you can now connect to it.
Once you connect to that table, data, you can start to visualise it and start to create your business intelligence.
Robert: Well, with that, I’m going to start up Power BI, and we’re going to work on getting my refrigerator data warehoused and see what we can transform there.
Brian: It’s all coming that way, man.
Robert: Awesome. On that really terrible joke, I have eaten up the last of our time. Brian, thank you very much for joining us. It’s been informative. I am looking forward to seeing what comes next, especially since I’ve poked my head into Power BI at least once and I know what it can do.
I appreciate the time, if you want to know more, there’s links down below. Please reach out, contact us if you have any questions, comments. We’d love to hear from you. Until next time, though. Cheers, mate.
Missed the first episode? Explore our complete video series on Business Intelligence & Data Analytics to catch up on what you’ve missed. Ready to delve deeper into the BI world? Download our comprehensive guide on Empowering your Decision: Mastering Business Intelligence with Power BI now!
If you have any questions or require Power BI Consulting services, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Contact us for expert assistance in unlocking the full potential of your business data.
