One of the holy grails that many data teams seem to chase is real-time data analytics. After all, if you can have real-time analytics, you can make better decisions faster. However, there often is a conflation between real-time data analytics and stream processing. These are two different concepts that are crucial to understanding how to…
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Running a successful data team is hard. Data teams are expected to juggle a combination of ad-hoc requests, big bet projects, migrations, etc. All while keeping up with the latest changes in technology. In the past few years I have gotten to work with dozens of teams and see how various directors and managers deal…
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Getting data out of source systems and into a data warehouse or data lake is one of the first steps in making it usable by analysts and data scientists. The question is how will your team do that? Will they write custom data connectors, pay for a data connector out of the box or perhaps…
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If you’ve worked in data long enough, then you’ve likely come across the term change data capture. Often called CDC, change data capture involves tracking and recording changes in a database as they happen, and then transmitting these changes to designated targets. This can be crucial because some pipelines, in particular batch pipelines, don’t capture…
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As data increased in volume, velocity, and variety, so, in turn, did the need for tools that could help process and manage those larger data sets coming at us at ever faster speeds. As a result, frameworks such as Apache Spark and Apache Flink became popular due to their abilities to handle big data processing…
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Have you ever been part of a data or software project that seems stuck in a loop? Three weeks have passed, and although you arrive at work daily, exhausted, having tackled numerous issues, the project remains stagnant. Why? Then, suddenly, a new engineer or project manager steps in, reorganizes and prioritizes tasks, and just like…
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No matter your industry, you’ll often need to make split-second business decisions in the digital age. Real-time data can help you do just that. It’s information that’s made available as soon as it’s created, meaning you don’t need to wait around for the insights you need. Real-time data processing can satisfy the ever-increasing demand for…
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SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) comes with a lot of functionality useful for extracting, transforming, and loading data. It can also play important roles in application development and other projects. But SSIS is far from the only platform that can provide these services. You might seek alternatives to SSIS because you want a more agile…
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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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If you’re a data engineer, then you’ve likely at least heard of Airflow. Apache Airflow is one of the most popular open-source workflow orchestration solutions that gets used for data pipelines. This is what spurred me to write the article “Should You Use Airflow” because there are plenty of people who don’t enjoy Airflow or…
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