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> MBA types

I chuckled. Then cried, because at least his MBA types can use SQL. My MBA types use Excel.

OT: Good article. Like and agree with the push for centralizing data first, then building outwards so external teams can move towards self-service.

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Building a good process into your company to receive a query, execute it against a read-only database, and shovel the results back to the user as a CSV file will pay dividends and is, honestly, pretty trivial in most cases.

Blazer is my go-to for this kind of thing:

https://github.com/ankane/blazer

Pretty easy to set up and share queries, dashboards, whatever

Funnily enough, this is what I did, except I built an app where I write the queries as "pre-built" parameterized ones (sanitized, of course).

People still do a bunch of stuff in Excel, though, and every once in a while, it breaks, and I have to dig through the mess. Excel is great when it's just for yourself and you can manage it... it's a pain when others have to figure out someone else's.

I'm an MBA type that studied math and computer science, and for a living programs distributed database solutions.

I chuckled too.

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