I tend to read a lot of posts online to keep up with developments in the data industry. This usually consists of keeping an eye on the data engineering subreddit, people I follow on Twitter (no, I’m not calling it “X”, that’s stupid), my LinkedIn network and data topics on Medium. I find this gives me a good blend of opinions and content to keep up to date with things (even if my reading list on Medium is getting wildly out of hand). One thing I find interesting is there seems to be a sense of elitism from some in the community who are quite vocal about what they perceive a Data Engineer to be (or not to be).

With the impending shutdown of Google Analytics legacy Universal Analytics product in favour of GA4, vendors have been rolling out updated connectors to support native integration between their tools and GA4. One notable absence from these updates was Microsoft’s Power BI, despite numerous requests from users over the past couple of years to provide native GA4 support. Fortunately, it seems with the June release of Power BI Desktop (version 2.118.828.0), Microsoft have released an updated Google Analytics connector in Power Query (a component of Power BI) which provides beta support for GA4 connectivity. I haven’t been able to find any announcement of this update, rather it appeared on some technical documentation for the Google Analytics Power Query connector on Microsoft’s Learn site.

I need your clothes, your boots and your employee ID. OpenAI’s Large Language Model (LLM) chatbot exploded onto the scene last November. In less than a week ChatGPT had over 4 million users and the Internet was awash with examples of prompts used and output from the chatbot. Some of the responses were so good that it didn’t take long for a wave of people claiming ChatGPT would make programmers, writers, support, and a whole host of other roles obsolete. A few months in and the doomsayers are still predicting widespread replacement of humans.

So how accurate are these claims of this particular AI offering taking our jobs?