Data fabric is a term that gets used a lot in enterprise tech circles, but it’s often explained in ways that are either too vague or too technical to be useful. Here’s a plain-language breakdown of what it actually means.
analytics
What is a Data Mesh?
Data mesh is one of the newer ideas in the data world. And it’s generated a lot of confusion. Unlike data lakes or data warehouses, it’s not a technology you buy or install. Rather, it’s a way of organizing how your company thinks about and manages data.
What is a Data Mart?
You might have heard “data mart” come up in conversations about analytics or business intelligence and wondered how it’s different from a database or a data warehouse. It’s a fair question, because the terms get muddled a lot. Here’s a clear breakdown.
Data Lineage Explained
Data lineage is one of those concepts that sounds more complicated than it is. Once you understand the basic idea, it’s actually pretty intuitive. And it solves a problem that anyone who works with data has run into.
What is a Data Lake?
Data lake is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in conversations about data strategy, often alongside data warehouses and data marts. But what actually is a data lake, and how does it fit into the picture? Let’s find out.
What Is ELT?
Data doesn’t always arrive clean, structured, or ready to use. And anyone who’s worked with data knows that gap between raw information and actionable insight is where a lot of the real work happens. ELT is a modern approach to bridging that gap.
Unlike its older cousin ETL, ELT flips the script by loading data into its destination first and transforming it there, taking advantage of the processing power that today’s cloud data warehouses have in abundance. The result is a faster, more flexible pipeline that’s become something of a default choice for many data teams building on platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift.
What is ETL?
If you’ve spent any time around data teams or analytics tools, you’ve probably heard the term ETL thrown around. It sounds technical, but the concept is actually pretty straightforward. This article looks at what the term actually means, how it works, and why it matters.
A Comparison of 6 SQL Rank Functions
SQL rank functions can be handy things to have when analysing data. Most major RDBMSs implement a similar bunch of ranking functions, usually with the same names. These rank functions allow us to assign rankings to rows based on specific criteria.
In this article, we’ll look at six commonly used SQL ranking functions, and observe how they differ. We’ll throw them all together into a single query and see their results side by side.
The rank functions in question are: ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), DENSE_RANK(), NTILE(), PERCENT_RANK(), and CUME_DIST().
What is OLAP?
OLAPÂ (Online Analytical Processing) is a category of database processing that facilitates business intelligence.
OLAP provides analysts, managers, and executives with the information they need to make effective decisions about an organization’s strategic directions. OLAP can provide valuable insights into how their business is performing, as well as how they can make improvements.