Hey there!

When applying for a position with SERV, Switzerland’s export risk insurance, I thought I might showcase a couple of reporting solutions that avoid the typical BI tools. The reporting should work in a transitional phase, where one cannot rely on a top-notch analytics environment (I’m mainly speaking about data availability... [Read More]

“Can you pull the new FTS numbers?” The message looks like a thirty-second favour. The first part of this pair followed it downstream, into a wrong number baked into an expensive decision, and landed on a single observation: the recurring failure is a question that was never framed properly before... [Read More]

A message lands in the analyst’s chat: “Can you pull the new FTS numbers?” It feels like a thirty-second favour. It isn’t. Hidden inside that one sentence are half a dozen unasked questions: which metric, which season, which period, compared to what, and, least asked of all, for what decision.... [Read More]

In the previous post I described how to load Parquet exports into a local DuckDB database — a fast, free, file-based data warehouse you can have running in an afternoon. The raw tables are queryable straight away. But to turn them into something reliable, documented, and ready for an analytics... [Read More]

Many business systems don’t offer a live database connection. They export data periodically — one Parquet file per table, dropped into a folder. That works fine for a one-off look. It becomes a problem the moment you want to join tables, apply consistent transformations, or connect the data to an... [Read More]