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

Getting started with Python


Chances are that you already have some version of Python installed on your machine, especially if you have a Mac. For the purposes of this exercise, we will be downloading Python 3 onto our Windows machine. At the time of writing this book, Python 3.5.1 is available for download; however, for the purposes of this book, we will go with the more reliable version, 3.4.4.

Downloading and installing Python

Similar to R, Python has a dedicated website for downloading appropriate versions of Python: https://www.python.org/downloads/

Once the executable file has been downloaded, run it to get the installation process started, as shown in the following screenshot:

Select the appropriate directory for the installation of Python 3.4.4. When asked to customize Python during the installation, allow all the features to be selected, especially Add python.exe to Path, as this function will allow you to just type python in a command prompt without having to type in the full path...