Authors: Martin Fiser, Field CTO at Keboola, and Martin Lepka, Industry Solutions at Keboola The Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) industry sits on a goldmine of data, yet many brands are only scratching the surface with their analytics. Locked within siloed Point-of-Sale (POS) systems across individual franchisees, this data remains underutilized rather than being put to work.

This year's Gartner Hype Cycle for Data Management report mentions self-service data management. It’s a game-changer that gives business users the power to work with data without constantly relying on IT, boosting data quality and making data available for analytics and decision-making. But what is it, really? How do you achieve self-service? Let’s take a closer look.

Historically, finance teams largely operated in the background, focusing on record-keeping, compliance, and ensuring that financial operations ran smoothly. Their primary responsibilities revolved around managing costs, balancing the books, and maintaining operational efficiency. In recent years, that has changed.

The purpose of this post is to describe the integration and benefits of combining Google’s new BigQuery Continuous Queries capability with Keboola’s orchestration capabilities. Combining these capabilities enables organizations to react more quickly to external and internal events.

Keboola offers a robust virtual branching environment, enabling users to seamlessly create a shadow copy of their entire Keboola Project. This allows for development and testing of changes without affecting the production environment. These development branches contain a copy of the underlying project data, ensuring that when a pipeline is executed in the development branch, the production data remains unaffected.

We’re happy to announce that Data Apps, which have been in Public beta since September 2023, are finally here for everyone. We received great feedback from the Beta users, and we are excited to roll out Data Apps to general availability. There is also few updates, see "What's new" below. Data Apps is a functionality that allows Keboola users to create interactive web applications that can be infused with your company’s data. It’s quick and easy and only requires knowledge of Python.

G2 is a leading platform for business software reviews, and their awards are based on customer satisfaction and feedback. To be recognized as a Leader, a product must have high ratings in both. We would like to thank all of our customers for their support and feedback. We would not get so many accolades without you. ‍

Keboola's availability on Google Cloud Marketplace opens up the potential of Google Gemini, allowing users to tackle advanced data tasks in just a couple of keystrokes. This integration marks the next step for AI-powered data processing and unlocks new opportunities for Keboola and Google Cloud users, language model enthusiasts, data scientists, application builders, and data engineers.

At Keboola, our aim has always been to put the customer first. We strive to be the best self-service data operations platform for companies, so they can get the most out of their data and grow their business fast and smart. Being perfectionists we tend to focus on what’s still not good enough and needs improving.

There are a lot of self-service data platforms out there. And picking the one that best fits your organization’s needs can be challenging. In this article, we’ll discuss what you should expect from a self-service data platform and what features make it a good choice.