The data platform, reviewed.
28 entries · complete archive
Tooling
AWS defines zero-ETL as integrations that minimize the need to build pipelines. Minimize is the honest word in the sentence. A short review of what the prefix actually deletes, and what it renames.
Platforms
AWS made the table format a bucket feature. What the managed layer actually buys, what it costs against running your own, and who should wait.
Platforms
We called the single-node renaissance early. Time to check the review against what actually happened, which is the part of criticism most outlets skip.
Economics
Power BI holds at $14, Tableau runs $75 to $115, Metabase undercuts both, and Qlik and Domo stopped pricing people entirely. The seat, reviewed.
Platforms
Snowflake, Databricks and Dremio shipped Iceberg v3 GA this spring. Trino is partial, Athena and BigQuery still read v2. The interop math, reviewed.
Practice
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.
Platforms
The semantic-layer interchange standard has a real spec, a real Apache incubator and a real gap between signing and shipping. We read the YAML so you can read the roadmaps.
Tooling
dbt Core's v2 alpha gives DuckDB read-write Horizon and Unity catalogs over Iceberg REST. Useful, checkable, and not yet something to put on a migration plan.
Tooling
Fivetran and dbt Labs closed their merger the same day dbt Core v2 shipped. Only one of those announcements changed what a data team can rely on.
Practice
In defense of the least popular conclusion a review can reach, and why the six-month delay keeps outperforming the launch-week migration.
Practice
Vendor benchmarks measure the vendor's best day. A short argument for running your own worst one, with our usual apologies to marketing.
Practice
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.
Platforms
Iceberg, Delta and the rest converged on features and moved the war to catalogs. Where the actual lock-in lives in 2026, and what to standardize on.
Tooling
Airflow 3.2 shipped asset partitioning, Dagster went pay-as-you-go, and the asset-versus-task argument is ending in convergence. A review.
Economics
The license comparison is the cheapest part of the spreadsheet. Where BI migrations actually spend their budget, and the line items procurement never sees.
Practice
Three years after the discourse peak, contracts settled into a useful, unglamorous role: schema enforcement at team boundaries. A review of what stuck.
Platforms
pg_duckdb hit 1.0 and made the boring answer better. When your warehouse should be your Postgres, and the three signals that the honeymoon is ending.
Economics
Most warehouse bills respond to four interventions. The ranking, the yields we have seen, and the lever everyone pulls first that matters least.
Tooling
Transformation moved into the warehouse and brought its costs along. What the Fusion-era tooling race says about where the pain actually is.
Practice
Schemas change; the only choice is how much warning anyone gets. The four strategies in the wild, reviewed from safest to most exciting.
Platforms
DuckDB made one machine respectable again. A review of what the distributed decade got wrong about the size of actual data.
Tooling
The SQL transformation layer has one incumbent, one architectural challenger and a lot of noise. A rundown organized around the pain each tool removes.
Platforms
The formats converged, the engines cross-read each other, and the real decision is about the team you have, not the architecture you admire.
Practice
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.
Tooling
Syncing warehouse tables back into SaaS tools is sometimes necessary and often a symptom. How to tell which one you have.
Practice
Before buying an observability platform, run the four checks that catch most incidents. A review of the floor, not the ceiling.
Practice
Real-time pipelines cost real money and most dashboards are read weekly. A defense of batch, with the arithmetic that vendors skip.
Tooling
Define the metric once, serve it everywhere. The promise is right, the adoption math is harder, and the graveyard has a pattern worth reading.
New reviews and printed corrections, by email, no more than weekly. The verdicts do not soften in transit.
The Vertex Journal