Rethinking Data

Rethinking Data

  • 22 posts

Is It Just Me, Or Is Everyone's Data Infrastructure Held Together With Duct Tape?

You know what you're supposed to do. We've heard the same refrains for a decade or more. Conference keynotes. Blog posts. LinkedIn thought leadership. Build a data culture. Invest in data literacy. Improve data quality at the source. Get executive buy-in. Implement strong governance. Focus on

Your Data Isn't Dirty. It's Just Not That Into Your Schema.

There's a version of a stat that gets thrown around a lot. Data teams spend 80% of their time on data preparation or cleaning. Eighty percent. We've just... accepted this? Like it's some law of nature? As if the universe decreed that for every

A New Kind of Data Freedom

You know that feeling when you've been doing something the same way for so long that you can't imagine any other approach? That's where Josh Pendergrass was when his company first started using Matterbeam. "At first I was like, that seems great. I

We're Building the AI Revolution on Infrastructure We Know Is Broken

And we're all just pretending it's going to work out fine A data scientist told me something that perfectly captures our industry's delusion: "I spend most of my time wrangling data. I can't trust my data engineers because they don'

Error 404: Clear Explanation Not Found (Now Fixed)

We have a problem at Matterbeam. Not a technical problem. A trust problem. Every company we talk to has heard our pitch before, or at least they think they have. "We'll solve your data pipeline mess." "No more broken integrations." "Data available everywhere,

Stop Blaming Your People for Your Broken Data

Data problems in companies are not due to people's lack of skills, but from the wrong fundamental approach that doesn't align with how businesses actually operate and evolve.

Beyond Data Lakes - A Smarter Evolution

Let's trace the evolution of the "data lake" concept The term "data lake" was coined by James Dixon, then CTO of Pentaho, in 2010. Dixon used the metaphor of a lake to contrast with the more structured "data mart" (which he compared

AI Agents Won't Save Us From Our Data Problems

The developments of generative AI in the past few years have been amazing. There are promises of AI agents revolutionizing everything from customer service to software development. Now they're coming for your data infrastructure. The pitch is seductive: AI agents will automatically handle data integration, quality, and governance.

Between a Rock and a Cloud Bill

You’re Doing ETL Wrong – Here’s a Better Way If you’re still managing your ETL/ELT pipelines like it’s 2015, it’s time to rethink your approach. The recent pricing change by Fivetran is just another glaring example of why the current trend in data integration is