4 min read

MDS Newsletter #61

In this week's newsletter read about unlocking behavioral data at scale, how an API-focused data catalog can help you ensure the success of your data platform and how data teams in organisations can make attempts to work closely with 'purple people'.

The Modern Data Show

S01 E11 Unlocking behavioral data at scale with Alex Dean CEO and Co-founder of Snowplow: 'Data as oil' is an extensively used metaphor and its impact can be gauged by how every business is heavily dependent on the data provided to them by 3rd party sources. Source data systems are finite, they have a certain amount of data with a limited associated scope. This is where Snowplow comes in and helps businesses deliberately create that data. In the latest episode of the Modern Data Show, we have Alex Dean, CEO and Co-founder of Snowplow data discuss data creation, behavioural analytics, data contracts, tracking catalog and where the modern data stack is heading in 2023.

Listen Now

  • Dremio Cloud is a fully-managed lakehouse platform. Data teams use Dremio to deliver self-service analytics while enjoying the flexibility to use Dremio’s SQL query service and any other processing engine on the same data.

    Dremio has raised a total of $410M in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jan 25, 2022 from a Series E round.
  • Rasgo is an Interactive Data Catalog for anyone in your organization to explore, transform, and visualize your data. Rasgo only stores metadata and leaves the raw data in your data warehouse.

    Rasgo has raised a total of $20M in funding over 1 round. This was a Series A round raised on Jun 24, 2021.
  • The South China Morning Post is a leading news media company that has reported on China and Asia for over a century with global impact. The South China Morning Post is a global digital news leader with a unique role in championing the plurality of voices in Asia through its breadth and depth of news coverage. Here's how SCMP has organsied their data stack.

Good reads and resources

  • Your Data Catalog Shouldn’t Be Just One More UI: The 'Modern Data Stack' wave of data technology has solved the problem of scalability in terms of storage and computing. One of the key pillars of this new wave of data technology was the data catalog but for some reason, data catalogs are content with the status quo as yet one more UI within the stack, but this needs to change. There are a number of capabilities that data catalogs can offer. Mahdi Karabiben takes an in-depth look into how an API-focused data catalog can help you ensure the success of your data platform by combining different types of metadata.
  • The important purple people outside the data team: The purple people of an organisation are the generalists who can navigate both the business context and the modern data stack. These people bring a unique combination of having a deep understanding of the business and a drive to learn about data. The 'purple people' may not be a part of the core data team and work elsewhere in the company and wants to move to a more data-centric role. Mikkel Dengsoe shares practical tips as to how data teams in organisations can make attempts to work closely with these and when done well, they will function as extensions to the data team, help solve important problems and handle ad-hoc requests.  

Upcoming data events, webinars and summits

  • Airbyte is hosting move(data)- The Data Practitioner Conference from 7th and 8th December.

    move(data) is celebrating the hard work and dedication of data engineers and practitioners worldwide. We're hosting speakers who have spent countless hours working on data integration. Learn best practices, share horror stories and discover tools and workflows that will improve the way you work.

    Register for the event here.

MDS Jobs

  • Mack Weldon is hiring 'Senior Analytics Engineer'
    Location: NYC (hybrid)
    Stack: Snowflake, dbt, Looker
    Apply here
  • Coinlist is hiring a 'Senior Data Engineer'
    Location: Remote / SF / NYC
    Stack: DBT, Prefect, AWS
    Apply here
  • ACLU is hiring a 'Director of Analytics Engineering'
    Location: United States
    Stack: Fivetran, Redshift, dbt
    Apply here

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