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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 11/02/2025

I agree but they've also been positioning Looker/BigQuery as a more open data stack recently. Specifically trying to market Looker modeler (the semantic layer part of Looker) as its own stand alone tool

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 11/02/2025

Yeah I've been following cube for a while now, lots of great new developments from their product, and love how they are breaking the metrics/semantic layer further out of the BI tools

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 10/02/2025

Anyone here used Looker (as a semantic/metrics layer) and Tableau together? How is the native Looker to Tableau connector?

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 10/02/2025

I never understood this, it's literally just extra lines of SQL code... because *reasons*

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 07/02/2025

Is there going to be a Small data meetup in Vancouver or Seattle this year? @duckdb.org @motherduck.com Please make it happen!

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 07/02/2025

There's so much value to add anywhere along the data chain. Honestly, blending business context (analyst focus) with data modeling is an extremely impactful role. Yes there's some shit AE models out there, but I've seen some terrible SQL written by data engineers too

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 07/02/2025

Another analytics engineering (AE) LinkedIn bash post. Hard to not react (my current job) but having an AE title does not assume you will build a spaghetti data architecture. There are tons of data engineers who create perfectly optimized data models that are used by no one.

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 07/02/2025

BigQuery just released UNION ALL BY NAME It solves the issue of perfectly aligning each field properly in SQL. As long as the fields have the same name you're good!

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 05/02/2025

I tried that for Google Analytics 4 issues and it didnt work 😀

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 20/01/2025

2) Set up reverse ETL data feeds that power machine learning experiences on a website (fit predictor)

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 20/01/2025

1) Designed and built an ecommerce data mart from scratch, integrating GA4 and GA UA data to provide continuous web analytics reporting before and after the Universal Analytics sunset

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 16/01/2025

Complex measure calculations in raw SQL is driving me insane. Yes we want to transform data in data warehouse/version controlled code, but these final mile calculations are so much easier/flexible to complete in a BI tool. Really missing Power BI right now lol

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 14/01/2025

Integrate their product? Or buy the [future] competition?

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 09/01/2025

how is your neck not absolutely wrecked?

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 08/01/2025

Very often I will see heavy sampling.. like 2% of available data with GA4 explorations We use the GA4 UI less and less.. and BigQuery / data mart is our "source of truth" for everything.

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 07/01/2025

I've never been to a data conference. In 2025 I'm making it happen (even if I have to personally pay for it, or if it's just a small data meetup in Seattle)

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 07/01/2025

Perpetually flip flopping on self serve analytics Some days it feels like it could be the holy grail - enabling downstream users to do their own exploration and analysis on governed metrics. Fewer ad hoc requests! Reporting automation! Other days: So what? Does that actually move the needle?

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 04/01/2025

Some of you have never had to fight for BigQuery slots and it shows

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 30/12/2024

andddd that fixed our paid session count bug:

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 30/12/2024

I fixed it with this little bit of code: CASE WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(page_location, r'gclid=.+') AND traffic_source_source = 'google' THEN 'cpc' /* Known GA4 misattribution bug */ ELSE traffic_source_medium END AS traffic_source_medium

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 30/12/2024

There were records where traffic source medium was "organic", even though that same hit contained a GCLID and the traffic_source name was 'google' This should be impossible, as the GCLID would only populate on an ad (and therefore should be cpc/paid traffic source medium)

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 30/12/2024

Google Analytics 4 contains a known traffic source misattribution bug in the raw BigQuery export. I fixed it with a few lines of code:

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 30/12/2024

Pretty easy to verify your bluesky account if you already have a domain. I just did mine using the below guide... does this mean I get a blue check now??? bsky.social/about/blog/4...

bsky.social

How to verify your Bluesky account - Bluesky

Here's how to verify your Bluesky account by setting your website as your username.

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 27/12/2024

Any data folks from bench accounting, feel free to reach out to me, we’ve got some data roles open in Vancouver

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 27/12/2024

It’s a damn tough market out there right now, particularly in Vancouver tech scene. You never know where you could end up, I nearly applied for some data jobs at this company before getting my current role dailyhive.com/canada/bench...

dailyhive.com

Canadian fintech startup Bench announces abrupt closure | National

Bench, North America's largest bookkeeping service for small businesses, has suddenly closed, leaving employees and clients scrambling.

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 23/12/2024

New [mountain] bike day! This thing is a beast, looking forward to the bigger brakes and suspension for north shore riding

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Reposted by Zach Renwick

The Onion @theonion.com · 04/12/2024

Standing Desk Celebrates 4th Year At Lowest Possible Setting

9711218669

Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 20/12/2024

Your longest ticket took you 48 days

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Reposted by Zach Renwick

archie.md @archie.sarrewood.com · 19/12/2024

@zachrenwick-data.bsky.social's resume is on @evidence.dev 🤯 zachrenwick.work

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 12/12/2024

Soemthing fundamentally wrong with Strava’s year in sport (Spotify wrapped, but for logging your exercise) is that December isn’t done yet and they’ve sent it out.

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 12/12/2024

One warning: if you are using events_ and events_intraday, prior day data can exist in both datasets for a certain amount of time. Had to build in logic to prefer full day export if exists (was not needed in GA UA)

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 12/12/2024

The native one (GA4 to BigQuery)? Yes, for events_ and events_intraday (not accurate) Have fun modelling sessions. The schema has also changed over time with new fields added

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 11/12/2024

Am I right in thinking one of the major benefits of open table formats is being able to bring your own compute (even if it's local?) I'm envisioning a future where I can load my development BigQuery/Iceberg/Tabular tables using my local machine. Anyone doing this already?

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 28/11/2024

Sick of waiting for inconsistent Google Analytics 4 data to land in BigQuery? No problem, just turn on Fresh Daily export. Data has been ready by 3am every day! Oh yeah and one small detail, you have to pay >$50k for GA360 🤷‍♂️

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 26/11/2024

The default chart look and feel is much better than I can do with Python. And frankly this workflow is just so much faster while still be reproducible (enough)

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 26/11/2024

Crazy that I started my data career as a project accountant with PowerPivot in Excel and after 8 years I find myself going back to it for quick/scrappy analytics PowerPivot provides the model/relationships/metrics and I connect to BigQuery datasets with ODBC.

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 26/11/2024

I did something like: with events_dates as ( select distinct date from ga4_events ) select * from ga4_events union all select * from events_fresh left outer join events_dates on events_fresh.event_date= events_dates .date where events_dates .date is null

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 25/11/2024

Not disagreeing but one Grafana feature that looked v useful was the ability to define dashboards as code. Tableau versioning and CI/CD is awful, are there other BI tools that are better on this front?

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 25/11/2024

Thinking about open sourcing the SQL code I used to integrate / join GA4 and Google Analytics Universal Analytics data to create our reporting datasets. It was a major unlock for our organization to have continuous web metrics before and after the cutover. Would that be useful for any of you?

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 17/11/2024

Our federated data dept is 60+ ppl, so the specialization makes sense. But I definitely see how you would want more of a generalist for smaller teams

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 17/11/2024

I think AE role being too narrrow depends on org and data team size. I’m an analytics engineer and there’s no shortage of work or value we can help push at the company. I don’t handle ingestion but I model/transform/join everything from raw data to final BI/self serve datasets.

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 16/11/2024

Has anyone implemented write-audit-publish patterns with dagster? Would be great to see some examples

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 07/11/2024

Dagster is awesome. Google Analytics 4 data landing time varies significantly every day, so we're building an automated sensor to trigger runs whenever the data lands vs the existing cron schedule. This will save me from having to manually trigger additional runs when data is late!

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Zach Renwick @zachrenwick.work · 07/11/2024

BigQuery & dataform (like dbt but integrated into GCP)

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