Companies that range from start-ups to enterprises are looking to implement AI and ML into their data strategy. With that it’s important not to forget about data quality. Regardless of how fancy or sophisticated a company’s AI model might be, poor data quality will break it. It will make the outputs of these models useless…
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I once had an engineer tell me that they essentially didn’t want to consider cost as they were building a solution. I was baffled. Don’t get me wrong, yes, when you’re building, you iterate and aim to improve your solutions cost. But from my perspective, I don’t think completely ignoring costs from day one is…
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SSIS, short for SQL Server Integration Service, is an essential data migration tool for modern businesses. As a key part of Microsoft’s SQL database software, It allows you to easily complete many complex tasks, including data extraction, merging data, loading and transformation, aggregating data, and more. It’s a comprehensive solution to your data management needs. In today’s business landscape,…
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The ETL & ELT tool market is experiencing continuous transformation, propelled by fluctuating pricing structures and the advent of inventive alternatives. This industry remains fiercely competitive due to these changing elements and a swiftly growing user base. In the following sections, we will explore four emerging alternatives to Fivetran. Of course, that is if you…
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Some data teams need to have their data near real-time for dashboards and reporting. So how can they implement a near real-time data pipeline? One possible choice is a method called change data capture, also known as CDC. I have seen companies employ multiple ways to use CDC or CDC-like approaches to pull data from…
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Starting new data engineering projects can be challenging. Data engineers can get stuck on finding the right data for their data engineering project or picking the right tools. And many of my Youtube followers agree as they confirmed in a recent poll that starting a new data engineering project was difficult. Here were the key…
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Photo by Lukas As you increase your analytical processes and abilities, you’ll unavoidably increase costs. But there are definite ways to avoid having your costs grow at an unsustainable rate. This is the topic of a panel at the Modern Data Stack Conference featuring Maura Church, ex-director of data science and data engineering from Patreon.…
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Apache Airflow is an extremely popular tool that data engineers rely on. But why? Why do data engineers like Airflow? Also, what does the Apache Airflow event do? In this article, we will answer questions like: What is Airflow? What is a DAG? Why do people use Apache Airflow? Why do we like Airflow?…
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Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash Recently several consulting calls started with people asking, “Do we need a data warehouse?” This isn’t a question about whether you need data warehouse consultants, but instead whether you should event start a data warehouse project. Which is a very fair question. Not every company needs a data warehouse.…
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Good Design Is Easier to Change Than Bad Design – The Pragmatic Programmer Programming is just one aspect of the difficulties of tech work for data engineers. Creating simple yet robust systems that help manage your data infrastructure is equally important. This challenge of building a simple yet robust data infrastructure remains even with no-code/low-code solutions. Just…
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