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From SQL to Slack: Automating Data Workflows with BigFunctions

BigFunctions bridges the gap between data analysis and action by enabling analysts to trigger actions.


In 2025, Analytics Engineers will build Data-Apps

Technologies make roles change.  Since the rise of cloud data-warehouses and the birth of dbt, data engineers......


Have you met Timo?

👉 To me, Timo Dechau creates some of the best content about Product Analytics. I've been following him for two......


A while ago, I wanted a daily Slack update on which kind of content was most viewed yesterday. It's nothing serious,...

Luckily, I had just recorded a hands-on session with Paul Marcombes about BigFunctions. And we discussed exactly......


📢 I'm pleased to share the latest article by Benoit Pimpaud about BigFunctions!

His article, "Beyond SQL as a Pure Database Syntax," really captures what we're trying to achieve. I'm happy with......


I recently explored SQL's limitations for analytics in a talk and in my writing, and I stand by these limits 🌶️

But I recently realized that SQL's syntax isn't the real problem. The core issue lies in its underlying semantics –......


What's up for me in 2025 👉 MORE Open-Source Data Products! 🤗

🔹 2024 In 2024, I built 4 Open-Source Data Apps: - bigfunctions - airbyte-serverless - catalog-builder - ......


Unifying Analytics Platform: what if you could have one tool to load, transform and activate data?

I had a great talk this morning with Burak, CEO of Bruin at DATANOSCO podcast from Stéphane. Burak shared his......


I am honored to get such high praise from the creator of BigFunctions!

Thanks a lot for the kind words Paul, great to see our vision fits into what you would expect to see as well. We......


All-in-one data-platform with configuration files. Why I love Bruin vision:

1/ Modern-Data-Stack limitations Modern-data-stack brought data tooling for any data service: - Fivetran for......


How to stay fast in a bigger company? Here's what I learnt during the last decade:

I started working 13 years ago in medical imaging. We were 5 people in the company. We built ultrasound scanners......


Just tried something really amazing with BigFunctions by Paul Marcombes.

BigFunctions lets you use Python functions directly in BigQuery, and thanks to its prebuilt functions, you can even......


🎯 Premier Replay de l'année : on démarre 2025 avec style !

Les nouvelles capacités SQL avec BigFunctions ! • Découvrez comment simplifier vos requêtes complexes • Explorez......


Static BI is going to be huge! Here's why I am VERY excited 🤯:

Static BI is about creating interactive dashboards on top of Parquet files. It's trending since we can run duckdb......


GA4 data is known to be hard to explore in BigQuery. But this will change:

Ali Izadi built dozens of handy SQL queries to cover areas like 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁, 𝘀𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗽𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀, 𝙚𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙧𝙘𝙚......


How do you re-use logic in BigQuery?

I often need to get the Net Promoter Score from customer surveys. The formula is "% promoters - %......


Mkdocs or docusaurus to build your data documentation website?

Both tools are used by millions of developers everyday to deploy their documentation website. Which one to......


Geocode an address in bigquery using data.gouv.fr

You want to get the latitude and longitude from an address for: - finding the nearest point of sale for a......


Introducing the SQL Declarative-Data-Stack!

Modern Data Stack have tools to do everything with data. Everything EXCEPT custom stuff. ➜ you end up with a ton......


I aim to build and define the data stack with a "single function", including the entire data engineering lifecycle,...

``` run_stack(   serve(     template='github://covid/covid_dashboard.md',     data=transform(       {         'groupb......


How to expose dbt models as API endpoints:

If your microservices could consume your dbt models with low latency, you'd unlock great use cases: ⇨ content......


Expose your dbt models as an api with a simple dbt hook.

This morning with Hachem LATRACH from Nickel we were at API Days Paris. We explained several use cases where YOU......


These days I write a lot about getting data from various different digital platforms into BigQuery*. The GA4 native...

But there is even more. BigFunctions by Unytics offers even more extremely convenient ways to bring data into......


Speaking with data-people is always full of surprises.

I like to chat with data-people from anywhere to get inspiration for my work or my side projects. Today at......


I was impressed by Sherloq this week.

Sherloq is a tool to organize and share your SQL queries. What caught my eye is the UX: > It feels like an......


Self-served data-analysts are much more impactful. Here’s why:

We often talk about self-service analytics. It’s a way to democratize data access in a company. It focuses on all......


Text to SQL may not be the answer for self service analytics.

Text to SQL is great as a coding assistant for Data Analysts. But it won’t help for business people to get trusted......


BigFunctions is a framework like dbt to supercharge your data-warehouse:

1/ - functions are deployed in yaml - dbt models are declared in yaml/sql. 2/ - functions are tested and......


It’s been 2 years I publish on LinkedIn. But I never introduced myself. 5 things you don’t know about me:

1. I am father of 3 children of age 3, 8 and 10. 2. I started gymnastics 2 months ago. It feels like die and......


Well, I’m nowhere near Kestra and their 10000+ stars,

But it makes me something to have reached 600 ⭐️ with bigfunctions today 🥹 Slowly but surely. Huge Thanks to the......


Unify batch / real time in data 🤝

At Nickel, we've built a configurable data engine: ✅ that allows data analysts to deploy algorithms ✅ in batch or......


sqlmesh vs dbt?

I bet for sqlmesh. Simply because sqlmesh paid product does not compete with their open-source product. It’s......


Unifions le batch / temps réel dans la data 🤝

Chez Nickel on a construit un moteur de calculs data configurable: ✅ qui permet aux data-analystes de déployer des......


🎧 NOUVEAU PODCAST DISPONIBLE !

Dans cet épisode, nous avons le plaisir de recevoir Paul Marcombes, Head of Data chez Nickel, afin d'échanger sur la......


[SPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT] We're thrilled to announce that Paul Marcombes from Nickel will be speaking at the Forward...

Paul is Head of Data at Nickel, and will how to unlock new SQL capabilities with BigFunctions, a framework for......


[Replay du vendredi] Comment Nickel transforme son entreprise grâce à l'IA

🚀 Paul Marcombes, Head of Data de Nickel, présente comment l'entreprise utilise l'IA pour améliorer l’expérience......


👨‍🔧 New BigFunctions : load_file(url, file_type, destination_table, options)

> Download web file into destination_table in BigQuery with SQL Under the BigFunctions hood : DuckDB & Ibis......


Do you have a lot of text data? ➜ Categorize it! ✨

The easiest way to get a holistic view of your text data is to categorize it. You'll instantly get: ➜ the main......


Easiest way to Get a Public CSV file into BigQuery 📝

I had great fun to do live coding with Javier de la Torre from CARTO. Within 20 minutes we could deploy this......


Extract Webpage Data with SQL 🌐!

Get structured data. Directly from webpages. Into your data-warehouse. Using a prompt embedded in a SQL......


👨‍🔧 New contribution to BigFunctions : `refresh_powerbi`

This function let you launch a PowerBI semantic model (dataset) refresh 📊 from BigQuery in SQL Documentation here 👉......


Converse with your User Feedbacks inside BigQuery ✨💬

Gen AI features provides new dimensions for data-analysis. You can: - Transform any text such as user feedbacks......


I just tried the brand new Conversational Analytics from Looker Studio. Here's 👇 what I learnt

All BI teams are working hard to enable users to get insights from natural language questions. Looker Studio is no......


I am stunned by the quality of this genAI created podcast 😲

I just gave NotebookLM (a new tool made available by google) two urls from BigFunctions website. And here is the......


Data Analysis: Is Structured Data Enough?

You can be the greatest data-analyst, you will never be able to uncover an insight for which you don't have the......


Surface the search behind the RAG 🔎 !

Retrieval Augmented Generation is one of the best way to get started with GenAI in a company. Mathilde Gorieu made......


Let's talk about Nickel GenAI use cases at Google Paris Office!

With Mathilde Gorieu we're going to share today what we've learned at Nickel while implementing several RAG use......


🦸 BigQuery Champions, Level Up Your Data Work with BigFunctions!

Data engineers, are you tired of manually building and managing BigQuery functions?  BigFunctions is revolutionizing......


Refresh a Tableau Workbook with a SQL command

dbt provides post-hooks. Post-hooks are SQL queries that run after model creation. Refresh_tableau is a function......


The stuff no one will tell you about running a data team:

1. You'll might need to say NO to more stuff 2. You can say NO to more stuff 3. You should say NO to more stuff 4.......


Put the right label to a value

Available to anyone in BigQuery Thanks Bartosz Figas for this great contribution to BigFunctions. Function doc:......


Load data from 250+ Sources with a single SQL query!

`get_data` bigfunction is available in BigQuery. It loads data from your favorite SAAS. No install is needed. It......


BankTech Day organisé par Finance Innovation se déroulera le 13 juin 2024 au Cloud Business Center !

Je participerai à l'atelier : L'Expérience client à l’ère de la data : banques & fintechs en quête......


Stop struggling with nested JSON in BigQuery! 🤼‍♂️ Flatten your data 🚀

Tired of endlessly navigating nested fields in your JSON data? 😩 You're not alone. It's like searching for a needle......


Loading data into BigQuery should be as simple as a SQL query 👅 !

Airbyte built awesome open-source connectors to move data into your warehouse. What if we could run them via a......


Build your own catalog of BigQuery functions 🌌

I like this article from Jake Holmquist ☁️ as it describes the two sides of bigfunctions: ➡️ Effortless access to......


Getting public data into BigQuery has never been easier ☀️

Thanks to remote functions, you can get data from any website into BigQuery with a simple SQL query 🤗 Here is an......


It's been a while since I've been this excited about a BigQuery function! 🎢

You can ask any question to the user reviews of an app (from the app store). 😮 1️⃣ The last 500 reviews are......


Great contribution to BigFunctions 👏 Axel Thevenot.

You made my day by adding support to UDAF + adding this great function. 🙌...


I am quite excited with PyAirbyte 😲 (Airbyte connectors available from python)

Airbyte (the leading open-source solution to move your data to your data-warehouse) finally released their......


What is a Staff Analytics-Engineer and why we need them?

Embed data-people in teams to scale One way to scale data analysis is to embed data people in teams, tribes,......


What if data-analysts could take actions themselves 🏀?

We had a great presentation from Tangi Gouez and Manuel Cellier from Dashlane last week at Nickel. They told us......


When to use BigQuery Dataframes over SQL ?

Querying your BigQuery data in SQL is very natural and efficient but you want to use BigQuery Dataframes (aka......


Get the Country of an IP address in BigQuery 🌐👀

Execute this query in your BigQuery : select bigfunctions.eu.ip2country('152.216.7.110') It will tell you the IP......


Moving data to your Data-Warehouse has never been easier 🏌‍♂️ !

Every data project starts with moving data from different sources to your data-warehouse for analysis. To this end,......


BigFunctions - steroids for BigQuery

If you're not familiar with or not using BigFunctions, be sure to check out the documentation – it's worth it.......


Testing Gemini, Google's latest AI model, from BigQuery

Excited to explore Google's latest AI model, I compared Gemini with other Google AI models using the 'ask_ai'......


BigQuery: Array Union & Array Intersect now at your fingertips! 🐣

BigFunctions has just release two easy but useful functions to obtain the union and/or intersection of two......


Want a demo of Serverless Data Pipelines?

✅ Move data with Airbyte Serverless ✅ Transform it with dbt ✅ Orchestrate with Google Workflows Airbyte is......


Extract info from a phone number in BigQuery 📱👀

Execute this query in your BigQuery : select bigfunctions.eu.phone_number_info('+33123456789', null) and you'll......


Data catalog is key for your data-mesh strategy. Why building vs buying?

I was at a (great) c2c event last night and I realized two things: 1️⃣ Without a good catalog, your data-mesh......


Famous assists:

⚽ Lionel Messi with Argentina 👠 Andy Sachs with Miranda Priestly 🇺🇸 Gary Walsh with Selina Meyer ☁️ Duet AI with......


Here’s what I do when I can’t find a BigQuery function to solve a problem 👇

Yesterday, again, I needed to do a transform for which 𝗜 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗕𝗶𝗴𝗤𝘂𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. 🧐 (decode......


If you want to build a web app seamlessly within your Jupyter Notebook, use Mercury.

Link to Mercury: https://lnkd.in/gpV3Sqk3...


Introducing Airbyte-Serverless for Airbyte & Serverless lovers ❤️

Airbyte is a must-have in your data-stack with its 𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻-𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗮𝗻𝘆......


Introducing Airbyte-Serverless for Airbyte & Serverless lovers ❤️

Airbyte is a must-have in your data-stack with its 𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻-𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗮𝗻𝘆......


You probably have too many dashboards…

… how do you want people to find the information they need from this overcrowded space 🧐? At Nickel, since we had......


Rule № 1️⃣ for reducing BigQuery costs:

The best data is the data you don’t store! - I just deleted 3433 tables. - And I instantly felt way better. 🤗 -......


Beware of dbt tests…. your money may disappear 💸

At Nickel, as dbt jobs costs kept rising we decided to take action. ☝️ This is when the great Rémi BENOIST decided......


From 1400 $ to 1 $ a month 👉 my best BigQuery optimization 🤑

If you are into reducing BigQuery costs you may have already explored: 1️⃣ partitioning your tables 2️⃣ requiring a......


Composable CDP are dead, long live Data-Warehouse Connected Products 🔌?

It makes no sense to waste effort building a 360° Customer View several times over with several tools. 🧐 That's how......


Tout sur le self-service analytics ou l’autonomie dans l’analyse de données.

A écouter sur la plage ou au bord de la piscine sans modération. Je retiens de cette discussion avec Christophe......


Data-Engineering practices are changing!

I love this very educational video from Richard Shenghua (升华) He which explains how a SQL query can export BigQuery......


Expose your BigQuery data in a real-time database from `dbt` 💎

BigQuery is perfect for massive calculations, but is not designed to obtain key-value data very quickly. And in......


Run any python code in BigQuery 🐍

When Axel Thevenot from Devoteam came to me and told me: 👉 ❝ What if we had a function capable of executing any......


Sync any dbt model into Google Sheet at `dbt run` 👌

Keep your finance team updated ✅ (or any other spreadsheet-lover ❤️) ! Thanks to dbt post-hooks and the brand-new......


😲 Ask Questions to BigQuery in English !

Every BigQuery user can NOW ask questions over their data in English. The BigQuery function 'ask_my_data' converts......


Generating PDF invoices from BigQuery 📄

You want to generate PDF files from BigQuery to: 1️⃣ Generate custom PDF reports with data 2️⃣ Generate customized......


Generative AI is available in BigQuery and I just learned two things 🧠

Google released new language models paLM2 this wednesday and I could not wait to add a bigquery integration. 😊 👉......


BigQuery Excel Report in your inbox ➜ the easy way!

Sending a BigQuery table as an Excel file to your team simply requires the execution of a SQL query 👀. (Thanks to......


Zero-ETL in BigQuery: there is More ➕

Did you know you can query any API from BigQuery 👀? By enabling data-practitioners to query data-sources without......


Sending Slack notifications from BigQuery 💬

👀 Guillaume Pivette from Neoxia just created a new function to send Slack messages with a simple BigQuery SQL query......


Sending notifications from BigQuery 💌

Sending Google Chat notifications from BigQuery has never been easier. 👉 Shivam Singh created a simple BigQuery......


Generate fake data in BigQuery

While working in a non-production environment you may want to generate fake data for testing purposes. Shivam......


De-identifying text in BigQuery

ELT has a drawback over ETL. As you get data without transform from your sources into you warehouse, (using......


Celebrating 🥳 10 contributors to help data practicioners

When I launched bigfunctions, an open-source product to help data analysts not reinvent the wheel, I wasn't even......


Tonight I met Felipe Hoffa from snowflake

Felipe Hoffa inspired me for a long time by writing content about data-warehousing and in particular: 👉 how to......


5 reasons why you want to use this bigquery function

1️⃣ Check that addresses exist 2️⃣ Clean up typos in addresses 3️⃣ Get address hierarchy with address components......


ELT replaced ETL

Most transformations are now performed in SQL in the data warehouse. For specific needs such as parsing xml data,......


Les data-analysts ne devraient pas se contenter de faire des analyses de données pour obtenir des insights.

@Data-Analysts, 🚀 Impactez directement l'experience utilisateur avec des algos data. 🚀 Je ne suis pas peu fier......


The modern data stack was founded to give full autonomy to data-analysts BUT we miss essential features...

What if a data-analyst needs to compute the sentiment score of a customer survey comment. He would ask a......


How I created an open-source repository after meeting a Himalayan climber.

Like some of us, I have dreamed of creating a product for a long time. But every time I wanted to get started, I......


Discretize continuous value to faster Data-Analysis in bigquery

To help your data-analysis you may want to discretize continuous values into bins of equal width. 1️⃣ You can then......


🔵 Advanced Json Query in BigQuery 👇

BigQuery native json support is nice but limited. We need more! 🚧 💥 sid ali sadi from Esmoz is bringing advanced......


🔵 BigQuery json made easy!

Oups he did it again! sid ali sadi from Esmoz created some very nice bigquery functions callable by anyone from......


🔵 Where will this end? Yesterday, a new contributor deployed open BigQuery functions to clean up text. And...

Today, another contributor deployed some more! A big Thanks 🙏 Benjamin Tabet for this contribution that will......


👉 Donnons le pouvoir aux data-analysts!

Complètement d'accord Robin Conquet. Rendons les data-analysts autonomes sur toute la chaîne (de la collecte, aux......


🔵 BigQuery Text Cleaning and Text Comparison

👀 sid ali sadi from Esmoz did a great job by adding the new `remove_accents` bigquery function callable by anyone......


Great article Robert Yi to get a view of semantic layer strategic choices.

...


🔵 BigQuery Auto Date Cleaning!

Sebabrata Banerjee (Sebo) did a great video tutorial to use regex for date cleaning 👨‍💻. What if you don't know......


🔵 BigQuery arrays made easy!

I recently discovered the great 'sql-snippets' open-source repository from Taylor Brownlow from Count. I ❤️ the......


Totally agree with you @Madison Schott! ➜ opensource for data is great to avoid reinventing the wheel and to share efforts 👇

Mateusz Klimek: I took the liberty of re-developing your `clean_additional_whitespaces` dbt macro as a public......


Rejoignez-moi lundi à Google Next Recap France:

- si vous voulez tout savoir sur le scaling des usages data chez Nickel grâce à GCP. - si vous êtes intrigués par......


🌐 Furcy Pin brings Graph Algorithms to BigQuery!

What a pleasure to see Furcy brings the first Graph Algorithm to BigQuery as an open function callable by anyone......


👀 What if common BigQuery functions were available from a unique place?

Last week, a question was asked in our modern-data-stack slack-community:  "how do you get if a date is a......


Et si on pouvait voir le profiling des données dans BigQuery ?

C'est important quand on commence un projet data de: - 👃 sentir les données,  - 👀 savoir s'il y a des outliers, - 🌊......


Ravi de pouvoir exposer comment dbt permet de mettre le data-warehouse cloud tel que BigQuery ou Snowflake au centre...

- en rendant possible l’autonomie des data-analysts sur toute la chaîne: de l’ingestion des données à l’activation......