The Vertex Journal· 1 min read
The medallion architecture is a slide
Bronze, silver and gold describe a diagram, not a design. On the vocabulary that conquered data engineering without ever being specified.
#medallion#lakehouse#architecture
Practice
10 articles
· 3 min read
The four dashboards every data team builds, reviewed as a genre
The executive mosaic, the wall of red, the vanity grid and the one that works. A taxonomy, with verdicts, of the artifacts BI budgets actually produce.
#bi#dashboards#practice
· 1 min read
Wait is a verdict, not an absence of one
In defense of the least popular conclusion a review can reach, and why the six-month delay keeps outperforming the launch-week migration.
#practice#verdicts
· 1 min read
The benchmark you didn't run is the one that matters
Vendor benchmarks measure the vendor's best day. A short argument for running your own worst one, with our usual apologies to marketing.
#benchmarks#practice
· 4 min read
Governance that ships beats governance that reviews
Access control moved into catalogs and policy moved into code. The governance programs that work in 2026 are the ones nobody has to schedule a meeting with.
#governance#catalogs#access
· 4 min read
Data contracts work exactly where people said they would
Three years after the discourse peak, contracts settled into a useful, unglamorous role: schema enforcement at team boundaries. A review of what stuck.
#contracts#quality#governance
· 2 min read
Schema evolution strategies, from polite to catastrophic
Schemas change; the only choice is how much warning anyone gets. The four strategies in the wild, reviewed from safest to most exciting.
#schemas#contracts#pipelines
· 2 min read
Change data capture, the primer we keep re-explaining
CDC turns the database log into a stream of what changed. How it works, where it beats polling, and the operational bill nobody quotes up front.
#cdc#pipelines#streaming
· 4 min read
The minimum viable data quality suite is four checks
Before buying an observability platform, run the four checks that catch most incidents. A review of the floor, not the ceiling.
#quality#testing#pipelines
· 3 min read
Real-time streaming is a bill most teams never needed
Real-time pipelines cost real money and most dashboards are read weekly. A defense of batch, with the arithmetic that vendors skip.
#streaming#batch#architecture