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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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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It’s that time of year again. When data leaders, VPs and Directors need to start planning out their data roadmap. Of course, this brings up an important question, how should you start planning out your data roadmap? Especially if you’re data team has found itself stuck in the data service trap. Simply providing data and…
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Data warehousing would be easy if all data were structured and formatted in the data source. Maybe we wouldn’t even need to build a data warehouse. But as anyone who has worked with data from more than one source knows, that’s rarely the case. Businesses today need to pull data from a plethora of sources,…
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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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Photo by Leif Christoph Gottwald on Unsplash A few months ago, I uploaded a video where I discussed data warehouses, data lakes, and transactional databases. However, the world of data management is evolving rapidly, especially with the resurgence of AI and machine learning. There are numerous other methods that technical teams are utilizing to handle…
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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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If you’re relying on your OLTP system to provide analytics, you might be in for a surprise. While it can work initially, these systems aren’t designed to handle complex queries. Adding databases like MongoDB and CassandraDB only makes matters worse, since they’re not SQL-friendly – the language most analysts and data practitioners are used to.…
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