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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Data has been consistently demonstrated to be a valuable asset for businesses of all sizes. Consulting firms, like McKinsey, have found that companies using AI and analytics attribute 20% of their earnings to it. As a consultant, I have personally witnessed how data can uncover new sources of revenue and cost reduction opportunities for clients…
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AWS has jumped on the bandwagon of removing the need for ETLs. Snowflake announced this both with their hybrid tables and their partnership with Salesforce. Now, I do take a little issue with the naming “Zero ETLs”. Because at the very surface the functionality described is often closer to a zero integration future, which probably…
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If you’ve worked as a DBA or data engineer, then you’ve likely had to deal with data access requests. These basic data requests can go from quick requests to endless data access requests that bog down entire data teams. This has been heavily driven by the fact that companies want to be data-driven. Meaning an…
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It can be easy to take certain tools for granted when you work for companies with mature infrastructure. One of my favorite tools at Facebook was iData. iData was Facebook’s data discoverability tool. It provided a lot of functionality that I have started to miss. This included the baseline functions you would expect including the…
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Databricks is a company that aims to make managing big data easy. By utilizing Apache Spark as its core processing engine, Databricks aims to make managing and processing big data easy. As one of the leading providers of big data solutions, Databricks has made a name for itself in the industry. What is Databricks? So,…
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Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash Companies that are serious about using raw data for business intelligence need some way to centralize and control that data. Many of them are using specialized vendor products to do so. Fivetran is one choice for getting all of that data wherever it resides and centralizing it in an…
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Maybe it’s the 6 figure salaries, the opportunity to work with cool technology or people are finally learning that data engineering is where everything starts in the data field. Whatever the reason, people are noticing. VCs are investing in data storage and ingestion platforms and companies are interviewing more data engineers compared to previous years. But how…
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