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.
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.
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 Scaling knowledge The hardest thing about scaling a company is communication. Here's how our latest release will make data communication just a little bit easier.
Company News Two years in and it's just getting good This week marks the second anniversary of Fishtown Analytics. Here's what we learned.
How-To How to safely convert strings to integers in Redshift This is a very stupid problem. I am not writing this post because it’s a fascinating topic—rather, I’m writing it in the hopes that you avoid the headaches I've gone through.
How-To “How do you decide what to model in dbt vs LookML?” I got this question on my last post. It is a good one, and one that I’ve gotten a bunch of times over the past year and a half. This post is my attempt to answer it.
How-To How to Integrate dbt and Looker with User Attributes dbt and Looker were built with the same ethos: analysts should be working in code.
How-To How to design your Looker Explores Frequently asked questions about Looker explores and how to design them very well.
Opinion The missing layers of the analytics stack Modular analytics tools allow companies to choose components to fit their needs and switch out or augment components as their needs change. Here's what I think is missing from the market.
Product News What, exactly, is dbt? dbt (data build tool) is a command line tool that enables data analysts and engineers to transform data in their warehouses.
Product News Why doesn't dbt support Python? dbt, our open source product for data modeling, is SQL-only. SQL can, by itself, accomplish a majority of analytical (non-data science) workloads.
Company News One year in: we're still in business Fishtown Analytics celebrates its one year anniversary today.
How-To The most underutilized function in SQL Over the past nine months I’ve worked with over a dozen venture-funded startups to build out their internal analytics. In doing so, there’s a single SQL function that I have come to use surprisingly often.
Opinion What are the steps / tools in setting up a modern, SaaS-based BI infrastructure? Business intelligence tech has changed really dramatically over the past 3-4 years since the advent of cloud-based analytics databases.
Opinion Is Looker the right business intelligence tool for my company? This post, originally published in 2016, was most recently updated in November 2017.
Product News It’s time for open source analytics When a software engineer starts on a new project, her first step is almost always to survey the ecosystem of open source software that exists in the problem space.
