Building data teams How should I structure my data team? A look inside HubSpot, Away, M.M. LaFleur, and more The data team is a brand new thing: it’s not “IT”, it’s not finance, it’s not any of the typical business functions within an operating business. So...who does it report to? How does it interact with the rest of the organization? How big is it?
Building data teams When did analytics engineering become a thing? And why? Analytics engineers provide clean data sets to end users, modeling data in a way that empowers end users to answer their own questions. Here are the market trends that gave rise to the newest role on modern data teams.
Building data teams The four priorities of a one-person analytics team: lessons from Lola.com Meet Sagar Velagala, Operations Manager at Lola.com. He's a one-person analytics team at a fast-growing, ~100 person company. Here's the analytics strategy that underpins his success.
Opinion Write better SQL: In defense of group by 1 My love for group by 1, 2 developed when I was a fledgling analyst and has only grown. Even if you disagree, I hope this rant will inspire you to be more opinionated in your SQL style.
Opinion Analytics Engineering: Operating with Leverage If your time is valuable, it should be important to you to operate with the highest possible leverage. This allows you to get more done with your fixed number of hours. Simple. Here's how analysts can operate with leverage.
How-To Four questions to help accurately scope analytics engineering projects Data teams are successful when they build reserves of trust. One important way to build trust is by consistently delivering projects on time. Here are four questions we've found to be useful in helping us spot the potholes that derail analytics engineering projects.
How-To How to track data changes with dbt snapshots All data analysts have faced the problem–how do I model data when the record in the data warehouse keeps changing? In this post, I'll cover how to solve this using dbt snapshots.
How-To How to review an analytics pull request Version control is a critical part of the software engineering workflow, but for many analysts, writing and reviewing pull requests is still a relatively new habit. Here's a checklist we use to review analytics PRs.
Building data teams How to hire an analytics engineer Modern data warehouses have upended the way that data teams function. Increasingly, companies are hiring a new kind of technical analyst to bridge the gap between data engineers and data analysts. Here's why and how you can hire one too.
How-To Data testing: why you need it and how to get started Advice from analysts and data engineers at HubSpot, Managed by Q, GitLab, Wong Decision Intelligence, AskWonder, and Calogica
How-To How Monzo, the UK’s favorite mobile-only bank, is rolling out dbt Stephen Whitworth, Data Engineering Lead at Monzo, spoke at the London dbt Meetup a few weeks ago. Here are my thoughts on his talk and what the dbt community can learn from it.
Opinion Five principles that will keep your data warehouse organized The natural state of the universe is chaos: entropy tends to increase in closed systems, and there’s really nothing that we can do about that. So too is the nature of data warehouses: unless action is taken to maintain order.
Product News dbt v0.14.0: Better serving our users dbt v0.14.0 lays the foundation for dbt Develop -- a query editor which leverages the brand new dbt server.
Company News Three years in: things are heating up 680 companies use dbt every week, 2100 members of dbt Slack, dbt Cloud processed 140k jobs from 200 accounts in June, and we're hosting regular dbt Meetups in 3 cities (NY, SF, London). What a year!
Opinion A wave of acquisitions in business intelligence Holy crap! Within the past week we’ve seen the acquisitions of the two biggest players in the modern BI landscape, Looker and Tableau.
How-To How to unnest arrays in Redshift Unnesting arrays on Redshift is a pain, but it’s doable. This post walks through the entire process, start to finish.
Opinion Pricing-vision fit Thoughts on pricing strategy and what it communicates about your company's vision for the future of the market you're in.
Product News dbt Learn: analytics engineering for data analysts We just finished hosting the first dbt Learn. Here's why we did it, what we learned, and how you can get on board for the next one.
How-To How we configure Snowflake At Fishtown Analytics, we've set up Snowflake accounts for several dozen clients and have an approach we like quite a lot.
Opinion Is dbt the right tool for my data transformations? As dbt is adopted by a wider community, we want to be extremely clear about when dbt is, and is not, a fit for your project. This guide will help you figure out if dbt is right for your data transformations.
Product News Introducing dbt Cloud The Fishtown Analytics team is incredibly excited to announce that we’ve re-launched Sinter as dbt Cloud!
Product News How we made dbt runs 30% faster In dbt’s latest release, we made some significant changes to how dbt processes these DAGs, and we’re seeing that these changes make dbt projects run about 30% faster.
Building data teams Does my startup data team need a data engineer? The role of the data engineer in a startup data team is changing rapidly. Are you thinking about it the right way?
Product News Using dbt docs The newest release of dbt, v0.11, ships with a built-in data documentation website for your dbt project.
