Mandatory Simple Knowledge to Survive Data Analyst Roles — Part 1
Everyone can be a Data Analyst but surviving the role is different story.
Here’s the 5 additional knowledge that help you survive the roles.
- Network Shared Folder
- Basic Server Management
- Database Configuration
- Integration and Automation Tool
- (Optional) API — Application Programming Interface
Brief Explanation
This article will explain the surface information of those knowledge. If you would like to understand more about the skills, you must find credible online course (ex : Coursera, Udemy, etc) to learn more.
Before working in data field, I worked as Business Application Support for 7 years. This job helped me learn all of the knowledge but I am not the expert on all the 5 skills. As Application Support, I had to troubleshoot any error from several point of view to get the root cause. Here’s where I acquire those knowledge on surface level.
1. Network Shared Folder
Before cloud system like One Drive, Sharepoint and AWS File Storage, we have Network File Sharing. The configuration was managed by IT Infrastructure team.
This kind of storage is not accessible if your device is not connected to Company’s Intranet (VPN). Folder path naming is slightly different to Local Folder path. In local folder, we are familiar with naming “C:\” or “D:\”. For Network Shared Folder usually have alias such as company name, then following with the subfolder.
Example of Network shared folder naming.
Network Folder Name : \\IDBTH03\\fsapac\
Alias Name : \\mycompany.com\\fsapac\End User usually only have access in the specific subfolder and it also can be mapping into your file explorer window. IT Team, sometimes, do the mapping before they handed the device to end user. Once the Network shared folder is mapping into local drive, the path will be similar to local folder path. For below picture, the result path of mapping will be
E:\
why is this important for Data Analyst ?
Folder path is where the file is stored, It’s like the address of the file. Data Analyst sometimes need to get the file from either local or network shared folder, mostly from shared folder. Everything will be fine if you run the program/script locally but when it’s running in the server, the script will fail to fetch the file if you don’t specify the address or if you put mapping shared folder address. Using the full path of shared folder is encourage to fetch any file located in it.
Besides, fetching the file, Data Analyst need to generate output file of finished data processing (most probably in excel file). If your company haven’t using database system, generating output file is necessary. Determining the output file path also important, full path of shared folder is encourage. So, you won’t be mistaken when you don’t find the output in your expected shared folder path. It’s not the processing issue, it’s the output location is not right.
Some tools like Alteryx or any IDE tools (Pycharm, Visual Studio) are also producing an output after processing the data. Fetching and generating file will be easier with one trick putting “.\” before the file name. This “.\” means the file to fetch/generate is located in the same file as the IDE Tools/Alteryx file located.
For example is formula for dynamic output FilePath in Alteryx. I put “.\Sales Reconciliation.xlsx” so it means I will generate the files in the current folder I work on the Alteryx. This also help to prevent error once I upload the Alteryx file to the server. The output file will just follow the current location of Alteryx.
2. Basic Server Management
Server is a hardware that expected to be run 24/7 with minimum disturbance. IT Team have their own team just for maintaining server. Windows and Linux server are the common server used by enterprise company.
Best practice IT Infrastructure must have 2 server with the same function as the backup. This is goes to run the application which critical for business and can’t be down for even just 1 minutes. For application development wise, there will be Production Server and Testing Server, even the bigger company will also have Development only Server. All this case is the best practice and Server’s price is not cheap, sometimes the smaller company can’t afford those luxury. But, the least is company must have production and testing server separately.
To login into server, we must have service account dedicated for each server. This service account will run any program/script deployed in the server.
why is this important for Data Analyst?
After finishing your script that you created in local device (your laptop or computer), the script will use widely by end user. We can’t rely on your device only to run the program every now and then, we have to rely on server.
Server run 24/7 hours to execute any program/script real time as you configured it. Once you run program/script in the server, it’s not your account anymore that is execute program/script, it’s the service account. Therefore, before deployed program/script, we must first grant access the services account to run the program.
For example, back to the network shared folder, we would like fetch or generate output to shared folder from the server. If the service account doesn’t have access to those particular shared folder, the program/script will fail. Thus, access to the shared folder must be granted to the service account.
Above picture is not how we access server, jokes aside. We have remote desktop to access it, or even now we can access it via website for cloud server.
I will stop the part 1 here, Please find the Part 2 in below link
Happy reading.
