ELT is a bridge between silos. A world without silos is a graph.

I’ve been banging my drum recently about the ills of Conway’s Law and the need for low-coupling data architectures. In my Curse of Conway and the Data Space blog post, I explored how Conway’s Law manifests in the disconnect between software development and data analytics teams. It is a structural issue stemming from siloed organizational designs, and it not only causes inefficiencies and poor collaboration but ultimately hinders business agility and effectiveness. 

So what should we do instead?

This is less of a technology problem and more of a structural problem. We can’t just add some missing features to data tooling; it’s about solving a people problem, how we organize together, how team incentives line up, and also about applying well-established software engineering principles that are still to be realized in the data analytics space.

Big data isn’t dead; it’s just going incremental

If you keep an eye on the data space ecosystem like I do, then you’ll be aware of the rise of DuckDB and its message that big data is dead. The idea comes from two industry papers (and associated data sets), one from the Redshift team (paper and dataset) and one from Snowflake (paper and dataset). Each paper analyzed the queries run on their platforms, and some surprising conclusions were drawn – one being that most queries were run over quite small data. The conclusion (of DuckDB) was that big data was dead, and you could use simpler query engines rather than a data warehouse. It’s far more nuanced than that, but data shows that most queries are run over smaller datasets. 

Why?