Opinion

Amada Echeverría | David Krevitt | Ian Fahey | Julia Schottenstein | Kira Furuichi | Sung Won Chung 15 Nov 2022 November 15, 2022 Amada Echeverría, David Krevitt, Ian Fahey, Julia Schottenstein, Kira Furuichi, Sung Won Chung

Ask anyone at dbt Labs, the most special week of the year for dbt is Coalesce. There’s so much work, anticipation, and anxiety that goes into Coalesce: Will talks resonate with the Community? How can we ensure speakers feel confident? Will folks be excited about new product launches? How can we make the online and...

Lauren Craigie 1 Nov 2022 November 1, 2022 Lauren Craigie

If your organization is growing, or already facing enterprise-scale challenges, this collection of Coalesce 2022 talks can help you navigate changes to team structure, expanding data use cases, and leveling up your infrastructure and development workflows. Module 1: Team and Stakeholder Relations (1 hr 35 mins) The work required to manage a growing set of...

Lauren Craigie 1 Nov 2022 November 1, 2022 Lauren Craigie

Current economic uncertainty makes navigating new data team investments a little tricky. Is now the right time to consider new tooling and frameworks? Is doing more with less a solution or recipe for burnout? What data projects most clearly map to near-term business gain? If you’re looking for the Coalesce talks that attempt to answer these questions, this is the replay track for you.

Lauren Craigie 28 Oct 2022 October 28, 2022 Lauren Craigie

Coalesce wrapped last week with more than 120 community-led sessions covering the newest tools and tactics in data. While many speakers had deep experience in analytics engineering and dbt—most attendees did not! If you're just getting up to speed in this space, check out this selection of talks for the emerging analytics engineer.

Sharon Rehana 9 Sep 2022 September 9, 2022 Sharon Rehana

The growing volume of data coupled with increased business use cases for analytics has created problems for data teams, especially around modeling, transforming, and interpreting data. In this blog, we discuss four common pain points data teams experience and how dbt brings everyone into the data pipeline without having to rely on data engineers.

Anna Filippova 30 Jul 2021 July 30, 2021 Anna Filippova

The data world needs more purple people — generalists who can navigate both the business context and the modern data stack. Let's put aside skillset dichotomies, and learn to feel comfortable in the space between.

Tristan Handy 1 Dec 2020 December 1, 2020 Tristan Handy

My thoughts on where our space has been and where it might be going.

Emilie Schario 29 Oct 2020 October 29, 2020 Emilie Schario

Translating business logic into code is technical knowledge. Building a marketing attribution model, forecasting, or calculating MRR is technical knowledge. Understanding the inner workings of the business is technical knowledge. So...is there such a thing as a non-technical data analyst?

Tristan Handy 15 Oct 2020 October 15, 2020 Tristan Handy

I originally wrote this as a part of our new analyst onboarding program back in June of 2017, shared with new analysts on their first day. It’s as true today as it was the day I wrote it, so I wanted to publish it more broadly. Maybe you’ll find it useful!

Tristan Handy 12 Aug 2020 August 12, 2020 Tristan Handy

A recent post, Dashboards are Dead, sparked a conversation about the future of data reporting.

Claire Carroll 3 Oct 2019 October 3, 2019 Claire Carroll

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.

Tristan Handy 24 Sep 2019 September 24, 2019 Tristan Handy

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.

Claire Carroll 15 Jul 2019 July 15, 2019 Claire Carroll

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.

Tristan Handy 10 Jun 2019 June 10, 2019 Tristan Handy

Holy crap! Within the past week we’ve seen the acquisitions of the two biggest players in the modern BI landscape, Looker and Tableau.

Tristan Handy 4 May 2019 May 4, 2019 Tristan Handy

Thoughts on pricing strategy and what it communicates about your company's vision for the future of the market you're in.

Claire Carroll 11 Mar 2019 March 11, 2019 Claire Carroll

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.

Tristan Handy 11 Dec 2017 December 11, 2017 Tristan Handy

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.

Tristan Handy 18 Sep 2016 September 18, 2016 Tristan Handy

This post, originally published in 2016, was most recently updated in November 2017.

Tristan Handy 18 Sep 2016 September 18, 2016 Tristan Handy

Business intelligence tech has changed really dramatically over the past 3-4 years since the advent of cloud-based analytics databases.

Tristan Handy 3 Aug 2016 August 3, 2016 Tristan Handy

Over the past three months I’ve been in the lab building Fishtown Analytics. There’s a lot of the company formation process that’s been fun for me. I love checklists, and treated the opening of this business as a really big one.