How to Set-up your own Google Cloud PostgreSQL database and Start Automating your Business Intelligence Operations using Holistics

Benjamin Goh -

Why bother creating a database?

The world is full of data. According to Forbes, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. We are fast moving forward to a data-driven economy. Decisions we make will be largely based on the current data, and we need it at an instance. If you are just like anyone else out there, with chucks of thousands of data, you will need a database. One challenge many people face when trying to go digital and get more out of their data, is the problem of setting up a database online, in the cloud.

What is Google Cloud PostgreSQL database?

Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL is a fully-managed database service that makes it easy to set up, maintain, manage, and administer your PostgreSQL relational databases on Google Cloud Platform. You can create and connect to a Cloud SQL PostgreSQL instance and perform basic SQL operations using the Google Cloud Platform Console and the psql client.

Automating your Business Intelligence reports using Holistics

Holistics amalgamates different data sources you have into a single reporting database. You can build reports from a single database without the need to manually export datasets from each of the data sources. Building a report is easy with our point-and-click feature and an SQL editor for the SQL-savy. Once satisfied with your report, you can schedule the entire process: Schedule the ingestion of data from different data sources to your reporting database, generate the report, and share it via email/Slack in your favorite formats (eg: PDF, CSV etc.)

Connect, Generate Reports & Share!

How to Get Started?

Sign up to Google Cloud

  • Sign up or log in to the Google Cloud website and go to your console.
  • Select the SQL product from the drop-down menu.
  • You are now ready to set up your PostgreSQL database instance.
  • Create instance.

Input Details for your PostgreSQL Instance

  • Select PostgreSQL as your database engine.
  • Give your instance a name and set up a password.
  • Select a Google Cloud region with a datacenter closest to your location.
  • Under configuration options, you can choose a small machine type in order to save on costs or you can leave it to be set automatically.
  • Hit create and let it run.

Connect your PostgreSQL Instance to Holistics

  • Head to your Google Cloud account, where the instance was created, and select "edit"
  • Under "Configuration options", set connectivity for Public IP and "add network"
  • Log in to your Holistics account (Sign up free: link).
  • In your Holistics, add a new data source.
  • The whitelisting IP addresses listed on the right.
  • Copy and paste each of this into Google Cloud and add them as a new network.
  • Save and wait for changes to be updated.

Create a User Account and Database in your PostgreSQL Instance

  • Select your instance, click on the user tab and create a user account.
  • Select the databases tab, click create database and give your new database a name.
  • Head to Holistics and input details to your new data source.
  • Under the overview tab of your Google Cloud instance account, copy and paste the IP address to Holistics.
  • Finally, the username and password are taken from user account that we created earlier.

Start Visualizing

  • Create a data import job to move your data from Facebook, Google analytics, or even CSV files to your new PostgreSQL database.
  • You can set the frequency to import this particular job into your database,
    such as every day, every hour, or even in minutes as you require.
  • Your querying process is now automated.
  • For a more detailed guide to creating your first report, you can read more here (link)

For the full video guide on setting up your Google Cloud PostgreSQL:

From Data Preparation to Business Operation: Holistics is a self-service data analytics platform that gives anyone in an organization instant access to data and insights.

Sign up for a free trial to start creating your first business report!

*Holistics believe in empowering data-driven teams. With the right tool, every individual can contribute in ways unimaginable to their team. We empower you by making our software flexible, intuitive and user-friendly.

And we happen to be able to automate the data processes for you so you don’t have to do the mundane tasks over and over again.