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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Whether you’re working at a large enterprise or a small business, there’s almost always a need to extract data from source systems, process it, and use it for operational or analytical purposes. That process, moving data from point A to point B, transforming it along the way, and making it usable, is what we typically…
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One of the questions most data engineers need to answer is whether this data pipeline should be real-time or batch. Sometimes posed as streaming vs batch. The tools you might use to do that have changed over the past few years, but that was always the question. The business, of course, would always ask for…
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Planning out your data infrastructure in 2025 can feel wildly different than it did even five years ago. The ecosystem is louder, flashier, and more fragmented. Everyone is talking about AI, chatbots, LLMs, vector databases, and whether your data stack is “AI-ready.” Vendors promise magic, just plug in their tool and watch your insights appear.…
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Data integration is critical for organizations of all sizes and industries—and one of the leading providers of data integration tools is Talend, which offers the flagship product Talend Studio. In 2023, Talend was acquired by Qlik, combining the two companies’ data integration and analytics tools under one roof. In January 2024, Talend discontinued Talend Open…
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A key responsibility for any data team is to understand the core metrics driving their business. Starting from the top, these metrics often include figures like gross revenue and expenses. However, these high-level metrics can feel too far removed and abstract from the actual business. Many companies, therefore, break down these top-line metrics into more…
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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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What would you do if you became the head or director of data for a 1,000-person company? Yesterday, you were plugging along as an analyst, and now, suddenly, you have all these new responsibilities. Figuring out where to start is part of the job. You’d probably feel a strong temptation to freak out. Who wouldn’t?…
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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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Recently, I wrote an article diving into what Druid is and which companies are using it. Now I wanted to do a deeper dive into Apache Druid’s architecture. Apache Druid has several unique features that allow it to be used as a real-time OLAP. Everything from its various nodes and processes that each have unique…
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