ML-E4: Lots of ways an enterprise might give you ACCESS to DATA

As an AI engineer, or worse, a data scientist, we are expected to also be experts in SQL, enterprise data, RDBs, no-SQL DBs like mongo, JSON, MS Excel, MS PowerBI and . . data warehouses and data lakes, whatever those things are.

Some of that expectation is reasonable. After all we’re data scientists for crying out loud! Or alleged AI ‘engineers’. (It eludes them that we’ve made ourselves experts at prediction based on data and productizing on the cloud).

All of that expectation is NOT reasonable. But worth knowing a bit about!

It’s especially the IT guys and data engineers that expect this, but our non-tech bosses can be the same.

So here’s some tips on how you might get access to data at both small and corporate enterprises.

ML series menu: E1 E2 E3 E4 E5 E6 E7 E8 E9

Small business data access

Using Spreadsheets

Most small businesses start out using spreadsheets to keep track of their data. These can be a treasure trove of insights when you know where to look.

Here is a simple example of how to access an Excel file using Python and the pandas library:

Similarly for csv.

Databases

As small businesses grow, they often upgrade from spreadsheets to databases. For example, SQL databases are…