Book Image

Practical Business Intelligence

Book Image

Practical Business Intelligence

Overview of this book

Business Intelligence (BI) is at the crux of revolutionizing enterprise. Everyone wants to minimize losses and maximize profits. Thanks to Big Data and improved methodologies to analyze data, Data Analysts and Data Scientists are increasingly using data to make informed decisions. Just knowing how to analyze data is not enough, you need to start thinking how to use data as a business asset and then perform the right analysis to build an insightful BI solution. Efficient BI strives to achieve the automation of data for ease of reporting and analysis. Through this book, you will develop the ability to think along the right lines and use more than one tool to perform analysis depending on the needs of your business. We start off by preparing you for data analytics. We then move on to teach you a range of techniques to fetch important information from various databases, which can be used to optimize your business. The book aims to provide a full end-to-end solution for an environment setup that can help you make informed business decisions and deliver efficient and automated BI solutions to any company. It is a complete guide for implementing Business intelligence with the help of the most powerful tools like D3.js, R, Tableau, Qlikview and Python that are available on the market.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Practical Business Intelligence
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Connecting Python to Microsoft SQL Server


Before we can begin to visualize our data within Python, we must first establish a connection to Microsoft SQL Server from Python. As in Chapter 2, Web Scraping, we will continue to use PyCharm as our IDE of choice for development. There are many IDEs that are available free of use to develop Python projects. If you choose to develop with another tool, you should still be able to follow along in this chapter.

Starting a new project in PyCharm

Once you have PyCharm started, you may have your previous project from Chapter 2, Web Scraping, still open. We wish to separate the projects, so we will close this project by selecting File and Close Project, as seen in the following screenshot:

Next, we can start a new project for this chapter by selecting Create New Project on the main menu, as seen in the following screenshot:

We can then select the Location and the Interpreter for this project to save our work, as well as confirming that we are using the...