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[REVIEW] Looker Studio vs Power BI 2026
Data Engineering
[REVIEW] Looker Studio vs Power BI 2026

Looker Studio vs Power BI: the short answer Pick Looker Studio if your stack is Google, GA4, Google Ads, BigQuery,…

 Airbyte vs Fivetran in 2026: a working analyst’s comparison
Data Engineering
Airbyte vs Fivetran in 2026: a working analyst’s comparison

Airbyte vs Fivetran: the short answer Pick Fivetran for managed reliability when engineering capacity is the constraint and the budget…

 ClickHouse vs Snowflake in 2026: a working analyst’s comparison
Data Engineering
ClickHouse vs Snowflake in 2026: a working analyst’s comparison

ClickHouse vs Snowflake: the short answer Pick ClickHouse for real-time analytics on event data above roughly 1 TB per day,…

 112 Duplicate Dashboards in One Metabase Instance: A Real Audit
AI for Data
112 Duplicate Dashboards in One Metabase Instance: A Real Audit

Last month I walked into a Metabase instance I’d never seen before. The client, a pet-tech marketplace doing mid-eight figures…

 Data Engineer Roadmap 2026: skills, tools, salary, and what AI actually changes
Data Engineering
Data Engineer Roadmap 2026: skills, tools, salary, and what AI actually changes

A practical 2026 roadmap for mid-level data engineers in the US: the skills that still matter, the ones AI made…

 A Dashboard Hygiene Audit for the First 30 Days of a Fractional CDO
Data Science
A Dashboard Hygiene Audit for the First 30 Days of a Fractional CDO

A new CDO walks into the office on a Monday. By Friday they have a list. Forty-seven dashboards. Six BI…

 A Gravity Model in 6 Weeks: Site Selection a Board Will Defend
Data Science
A Gravity Model in 6 Weeks: Site Selection a Board Will Defend

Most retailers pick new store locations the same way they did in 2005: a heatmap, a real-estate broker, and a…

 How a 1-Point Price Increase Becomes a Real Project: A 6-Month Playbook
Data Science
How a 1-Point Price Increase Becomes a Real Project: A 6-Month Playbook

A one-point increase in net sales per unit looks like a sticker change. In a real consumer goods business it…

 dbt 101: What You Need on Day 1 (and 10 Best Practices for the Day After)
Data Science
dbt 101: What You Need on Day 1 (and 10 Best Practices for the Day After)

You have a folder of 240 SQL files and no execution order. dbt is the answer to exactly that folder.…

 Building a Data Mart with Claude Over MCP, in 20 Minutes
Data Engineering
Building a Data Mart with Claude Over MCP, in 20 Minutes

This is a walk-through of one consulting engagement, not a theoretical piece on AI tooling. The brief was small enough…

 Migrating Off Redash, For The Last Time
Data Engineering
Migrating Off Redash, For The Last Time

I spent three years writing about Redash. The first post in late 2018 framed it as on-demand analytics with a…

 10 Dashboard Design Rules, 6 Years Later
Data Engineering
10 Dashboard Design Rules, 6 Years Later

When we adapted Slava Shestopalov’s “10 rules for better dashboard design” in late 2020, the list felt close to definitive.…

 Telegram in 2026: Still a Data Source, Now a Real Agent Platform
Data Science
Telegram in 2026: Still a Data Source, Now a Real Agent Platform

Most teams still treat Telegram the way they did in 2021: scrape a channel, pull a list, hope the API…

 BigQuery vs Snowflake in 2026: a working analyst’s comparison
Data Engineering
BigQuery vs Snowflake in 2026: a working analyst’s comparison

The 2026 head-to-head moved past features. Pricing, real concurrency, and operational fit decide it. List prices, TCO scenarios, the Fivetran…

 Claude Code on a data team: three rollouts, real numbers, and what we’d do differently
Data Engineering
Claude Code on a data team: three rollouts, real numbers, and what we’d do differently

Five engineers on Max plans, two months of receipts, and three rollouts (Fivetran, Metabase, MetaLens) with concrete time and cost…

 How to Use dbt MCP with Claude Code (and Stop Grepping the Manifest)
AI for Data
How to Use dbt MCP with Claude Code (and Stop Grepping the Manifest)

How to set up dbt Labs' official MCP server with Claude Code, including a real legacy-project audit story, the read-only…

 Why Your A/B Test Won’t Measure That Policy Change
Data Engineering
Why Your A/B Test Won’t Measure That Policy Change

The marketing director walks into a planning meeting on Monday with a proposed packaging change for the company’s flagship product.…

 How to Use Fivetran MCP with Claude Code (and Stop Clicking Through Connector UIs)
AI for Data
How to Use Fivetran MCP with Claude Code (and Stop Clicking Through Connector UIs)

How to set up Fivetran's official MCP server with Claude Code, with a real client case study (HelpScout to BigQuery),…

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