As always, June has been a busy month for the data ecosystem with both the Snowflake and DataBricks Summits. It has also been a busy month at CastorDoc, as we had our annual team offsite. The whole CastorDoc team gathered in the south of France for three days of team building and reuniting around the vision. But our time in France or the New York heatwaves won’t stop us from curating the newsletter. As always, you can expect to find:
- One?tool?that we believe is worth digging into as a?data?person.
- A curated list of the best articles we've read this month, along with brief teasers.
- Show and Tell: Some exciting updates from the CastorDoc team.
- A data meme, to brighten your day.
Tobiko, a new player in the data transformation space, has just secured $21.8 million in funding. Founded by Tyson and Toby Mao along with Iaroslav Zeigerman, Tobiko is introducing a dbt-compatible platform built on the popular open-source projects SQLMesh and SQLGlot.
What sets Tobiko apart is its emphasis on accessibility and ease of use. Their platform features a low-code interface designed to make data transformation more approachable for a wider range of users, potentially bridging the gap between data engineers and less technical team members. This user-friendly approach is complemented by advanced SQL understanding capabilities and virtual data environments, aiming to simplify complex data operations. Tobiko is positioning itself to serve companies of all sizes, from startups to enterprises, by offering a more intuitive alternative to code-heavy solutions. As it enters a market dominated by established tools like dbt, Tobiko's focus on usability could be a key differentiator.
We'll be watching closely to see how Tobiko's approach impacts the data transformation landscape. We've added Tobiko to our data transformation tool comparison, which you can find below.
- Databricks, Snowflake and the future. This month, everyone in the data world couldn't stop talking about the big announcements from Snowflake and Databricks at their summits, both held in San Francisco within a week of each other. This article by Christophe Blefari is a great recap of the announcements made by both companies at the summits. Key announcements include Snowflake's support for Apache Iceberg and Databricks' whopping $1 billion acquisition of Tabular. The author also shares his take on how these moves are reshaping the data platform landscape. Whether you're a data engineer, analyst, or leader, this article will help you understand the future direction of Snowflake and Databricks and how it might impact your work.
- Summit Season. The two Summits animated a lot of the discussions in the data ecosystem in June. So it’s no surprise that this second piece also dives into the same topic. As an industry veteran, Tristan Handy provides his own insider perspective on the two summits. This piece focuses more on open table formats and their potential to reshape the data ecosystem. He explores how these changes could impact data infrastructure costs and platform competition. The author discusses the GenAI announcements from both companies and their partnership with NVIDIA. This piece provides a great industry analysis, more than just a recap of the two conferences.
- Skills and Jobs. Katie Bauer challenges data leaders to reconsider the role of data professionals in today's tech landscape. Through a relatable day-in-the-life scenario and incisive analysis, Bauer explores whether data is becoming a universal skill or remains a specialized profession. This piece is essential reading for anyone grappling with team structure, skill development, and the future of data roles.
- Feature of the month: Instant Feedback for AI Assistant. We've just rolled out a new feature to make our AI Assistant even better. Now, you can give quick feedback on AI responses with a simple "Thumbs down" button, both in the CastorDoc app and in Slack. This feedback is crucial for your Data Governance team (and us at CastorDoc!) to identify and improve unsatisfactory interactions,?ultimately enhancing the relevance and quality of our AI Assistant's responses. Take some time to chat with the team if you’d like to hear more about this feature.
- Article of the month: LLMs don’t cut it for data analytics. We have been thinking a lot about LLMs and data analytics lately, and I wanted to share some thoughts about this topic. In this piece, I look at whether AI can really do our data analysis for us. Turns out, it's not so simple. I break down two ways people are trying to use AI for analytics and talk about what works and what doesn't. If you're wondering about the capabilities of AI when it comes to answering data questions in a trustworthy way - you will find this piece interesting.
No data meme this week - but a picture of our whole team enjoying some time together during the summer retreat!
Data News on blef.fr ??? — Co-Founder @ nao
5 个月Thanks for the mention ??