Our Top Tips From 2023

In 2023, we started sharing weekly tips to develop your skills across areas including analytics, data and technology. Make sure you follow our LinkedIn page so you never miss a Tip Tuesday.

Tip 1 | How to prepare data for analysis?

Preparing the data is one of the most important stages in any data pipeline.

How do you prepare your data for analysis?

Any analysis or machine learning model will only be as good as the data it is trained on.

Even clean, structured and standardised database data is not usually suitable for modelling straight away, there are different cleaning and data preparation steps required to make it usable for different analyses and algorithms.

How to prepare your data:

Have a general understanding of the data.
Have an understanding of the techniques you intend to use.
Have business domain knowledge to highlight important variables.

This helps you to identify and remove irrelevant content without adding bias to your data.

Raw data may have pre-existing biases. Taking the time to thoroughly explore the data will help you to identify any such biases, and inform your approach to mitigating their impact on the analysis or model.

Tip 2 | Use Usage Tracking information to understand how your Oracle Analytics platform is being used

Understanding how your Oracle Analytics platform is being used is critical in delivering a valuable service and maintaining good levels of user adoption.

Make the most of the Usage Tracking information that gets logged whenever the system is accessed. Use it to:

See which users are using the system
Understand how access varies throughout the working day
Work out which dashboards and analyses are being used (and which ones aren’t)
Identify any unusually poorly performing dashboards

Making this information visible through a suite of dashboards will open up insights that can be shared with your user base.

Weave this insight into your governance framework, so that the service can be continually improved and kept relevant as you move forward.

Tip 3 | Quickly secure a new OCI Tenancy using the Oracle Landing Zone

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is great for quickly provisioning databases, compute instances and much more. However, there is a lot of work required to setup a new tenancy to enable your users to use OCI services in a safe and secure manner from day one.

It’s easy to spend too much time securing and planning new services and there’s a great temptation skip steps or give users more access than they should have just to get them going quickly. If setup isn’t controlled, the tenancy can quickly become overly complex and difficult to manage.

This is where the Oracle Landing Zone can help. It’s an easy to use Terraform script that will quickly setup all the basic security components, with standardised naming conventions, setting up compartments, user groups and policies, security zones, event logging and notifications as well as a basic VCN/Subnet network structure and a host of other best practise services that come as standard in OCI but are turned off by default.

This is not a fixed configuration, it’s a standard, sensible security model which you can modify and expand as your use of OCI grows over time. You can also run it multiple times to create separate ‘zones’ in your tenancy all with their own distinct security configuration – easily create zones for Prod, Dev, Testing, Sandboxes etc.

It’s easy to run.

Login to your tenancy
Then go to this site: https://docs.oracle.com/en/solutions/cis-oci-benchmark/index.html
Click the ‘Deploy to Oracle Cloud’ button. You’ll be taken through a short wizard asking basic questions about your requirements.
It will be done in 20 minutes. Performing what would otherwise be hours of manual configuration.

This site also provides lots of detail about what the landing zone script does and how you
can take it forward to keep your tenancy secure.