Category: data engineering

airflow tutorial

Are Data Teams Still using Airflow For Their Data Pipelines?

Someone once called me the “Airflow Guy“. I found it a little strange. I have really only written a few articles on Airflow. But you never know what sticks with people. Airflow was a very popular data orchestration solution in 2020. It was only about five years old at the time. Fast forward a few…
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October 6, 2026 0
Columnar Storage

What Is Columnar Storage – The Building Blocks Of Data Warehouses

Let me start out by saying that not every data warehouse uses a columnar storage format. They often do benefit from it though. Data engineering teams often discuss columnar storage. Especially when discussing data warehouses or file formats like Parquet. But why does it matter and why do analytics benefit from columnar storage formats? Whether…
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September 26, 2026 0
5 best cdc options

5 CDC Tools and the Tradeoffs You Should Know

Not every data pipeline or process needs to be real-time. In fact, in my experience, often times when clients ask for real-time they mean daily or hourly loads. But, every so often there are use cases where real-time is required. Beyond how frequently a data pipeline needs to be processed, some also need to capture…
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September 5, 2026 1
data engineering

What Leading a Data Team Actually Looks Like Right Now

There are certain problems that seem to never really go away if you’re leading a data team. Don’t get me wrong. The tech world is currently saturated by AI hype. Not only because every tool you look at now just feels like a thin layer of ChatGPT, but every conversation you have with the business…
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August 31, 2026 0
alternatives to cdata

Exploring Top Alternatives to CData for ELT Solutions

Here is something that remains true in the era of AI. Data is still siloed and hard to access. Are there plenty of tools that can help make data ingestion and ETL easier? Yes, but they aren’t all created equal. One established solution is CData. According to CData, its products provide live connectivity and data…
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July 11, 2026 0
data quality pipelines

Why Data Quality Checks Fail – Too Many Alerts, Not Enough Ownership

Every morning, your team wakes up to over one hundred data quality alerts. I know, I recall this issue at Facebook. Some of them would be fixable issues others should have just been warnings. It’s so easy to build data pipelines and add data quality checks these days that I am sure for some people…
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May 24, 2026 0
setting up your data stack

12 Videos To Watch Before Setting Up Your Data Stack Or Paying For Snowflake

When you demo a new data tool, everything works perfectly. Account executives are great at making it sound like their product is the perfect product. They make sure their data pipelines run smoothly. The demo dashboards that load in seconds. And of course, the graphs and charts they put together look pretty impressive. So, you…
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May 22, 2026 0
elt vs etl

Does ELT vs. ETL Even Still Matter?

Data teams continue to debate which is better: ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) or ELT (Extract, Load, Transform). Meanwhile, they are overspending, pipelines are breaking, or no one is utilizing the data. So, does this debate even matter anymore? Ok perhaps that’s harsh but I do always find it a little funny when people still talk…
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May 2, 2026 0

How To Set-up Your Data Stack For 2026 – Data Infrastructure For AI

We are several years into the AI Revolution, so to speak, and with that has come an increased demand for data. The increased demand for data comes an increased demand for data infrastructure. Some companies already have reliable data stacks; others are looking to migrate to Snowflake, Databricks, or some other solution(I am sure some…
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April 13, 2026 0
why data pipelines exist

What Are Data Pipelines And Why Do They Exist

The demand for data has grown substantially in this AI-driven world. Meaning, there are more and more data pipelines being created. The funny thing is, when I first started in the data world, no one around me used the term data pipeline. I am sure plenty of data teams used the term data pipeline. But…
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April 1, 2026 0