Archive
A collection of 80 issues
Latest
The Wrong Response to a Shifting Market
Three default moves senior technical practitioners make when rates begin to compress, and why each makes the underlying position worse.
RAG Does Not Fail Because of the Model. It Fails Because of the Data.
Every enterprise AI strategy deck I have seen in the past years contains the same promise: “We will build a RAG-based knowledge assistant…
Data Engineering Is Not Dying. But Management Is Doing Its Best to Kill It.
How corporate cost-cutting is creating the exact problem AI was supposed to solve.
The Most Dangerous System in Your Bank Runs on Excel
“The spreadsheet is the most dangerous piece of software ever created.” — Daniel Lemire
AI Agents Are Quietly Rewriting the Cloud Database Cost Model
I have spent over twenty years building and optimising enterprise data warehouses, and in that time, I have watched the industry cycle…
Your Next Data Warehouse Migration Will Fail for the Same Reason the Last One Did
There is a question that is almost never asked in the data platform debate, and the reason it is not asked is that nobody benefits from the…
Stop Comparing Teradata, Snowflake, and Databricks. Start Asking These Questions Instead.
A vendor-neutral look at the architectural trade-offs that actually matter
Microsoft Fabric vs. Databricks: What Enterprise Teams Actually Need to Know
When Microsoft launched Fabric, it promised to unify analytics under one roof. Databricks, meanwhile, has been building its lakehouse…
The Great Fragmentation — How One Job Became Thirty Titles
In my last post, I described a time when five people could build and maintain an entire data warehouse. That era ended not because the…
Data Warehouse of Horrors: 20 Years of Watching Smart People Build Stupid Things
Chapter 1: When Data Warehousing Was Still Fun
From 12,400 Partitions to 3: How Snowflake’s Four Access Paths Actually Work
If you come from Teradata, Oracle, or SQL Server, the first thing you learn about Snowflake stops you cold: there are no indexes on…
How Survival Instinct Is Reshaping the Data Warehouse
Every data platform eventually faces the same question: how do you serve both the analyst running a full-table scan across billions of rows…
Seven Table Types, Five Serverless Meters, and Zero DBAs: Snowflake’s Quiet Evolution
Snowflake in 2026 is not the platform you onboarded onto. The question is whether your team has noticed.
The 15-Year Detour: How the Data Industry Spent Billions Reinventing SQL
Somewhere around 2020, the data world quietly arrived at a conclusion that Teradata engineers could have told you in 1984: SQL on a…
Why Two Identical Teradata Migrations Produce Wildly Different Snowflake Costs
Migration success stories are everywhere. A quick search reveals case studies of companies that moved from Teradata to Snowflake and…
The Medallion Architecture Is Not New. We Just Called It Something Else.
Why data warehouse professionals have been doing “bronze, silver, gold” for over 20 years.
5 Things That Break When You Migrate from Teradata to Snowflake
What Twenty Years of Teradata Expertise Won’t Prepare You For
Teradata Join Indexes vs. Snowflake Materialized Views — A Technical and Pragmatic Comparison
Database features should be compared based on their documented behavior, their operational impact, and the architectural principles behind…
From QueryBand to Query Tag
How to Track Query and User Activity After Migrating from Teradata to Snowflake