In this article let us look at dbt (data build tool) — what it actually is, why analytics engineering teams reach for it, and how to get a basic project running. I will walk through setting up mode...
If you have data sitting in S3 and someone asks you a question that needs SQL to answer, you basically have two paths: spin up something that loads the data somewhere first, or query it where it li...
You have probably heard the phrase “S3 is schema on read” a hundred times. What people say less often is that your folder structure becomes your schema — whether you planned it that way or not. In...
When I started building data pipelines, I kept hearing “batch” and “streaming” thrown around like they were completely different worlds. It took me a while to realise they are not as far apart as t...
In this article, let us look at what ETL and ELT actually mean in practice — not the textbook definitions you have already read a hundred times, but what happens when you sit down to build a pipeli...
In this article, let us look at the Medallion Architecture — a data design pattern that organises your data lake into three layers: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. If you have heard terms like “bronze ta...
When I started building data pipelines on Databricks, the orchestration piece was always the awkward part. You would write your notebooks, get the transformations working, and then you had to figur...
When I first started working with GCP, I kept hearing about Dataflow but wasn’t quite sure where it fit. We had Cloud Functions for light event-driven work, Composer (managed Airflow) for orchestra...
If you have worked with BigQuery for any reasonable amount of time, you have probably stared at a query that scanned a few hundred gigabytes when it really only needed a few megabytes. That is usua...
In a previous article we looked at Terraform for managing data infrastructure on GCP. Terraform is great, but if your team works mostly in AWS and writes Python or TypeScript all day, you might fin...