MDS Newsletter #31

The little things that keep us all excited about the resource that we are trying to build for the data community! ??

Let's dive in to look at what's been happening in the data space this week!

Community Speaks

This week's question: Any tips on ensuring smooth functioning between Analytics teams and Platform/Engineering teams so that analytics team don't get stuck in the middle? You can answer this question over here!

Last week's question: Which data stack tools categories do you think might get bundled in the future?

??There are mainly 4 categories 1) Storage/Compute 2)ETL 3) Analytics 4) Data Catalog and few other stand alone categories like Metrics layer, Data Ops, Data Observability, etc. Having all of these features as categories is not sustainable. A company will not be able to evaluate all of these tools, go through procurement, etc. This is why we will see bundling. With that setup, I believe two things may happen: either everything gets bundled into those 4 categories or another category emerges (for example around security), and then everything gets bundled into those 5 categories. What is going to be interesting is to see how the value of a category improves depending on the feature that it adds. For example, how much value is increased if data quality is added to ETL vs Storage/Compute vs Data Catalog. That is the open question. Let’s not forget, the bundling must be tied to the value it is providing to a business- Juan Sequeda

ETL and reverse ETL are a great strategic match to get bundled in the future. Using one integration to ingest and disseminate data will make it easier and less costly for data teams to manage their data pipelines. Andrew Konrad

Featured tools of the week

• Firebolt is the cloud data warehouse for builders of next-gen analytics experiences. Combining the benefits and ease of use of modern architecture with a sub-second performance at a terabyte-scale, Firebolt helps data engineering and dev teams deliver data applications that end-users love. Category: Data Warehouse. Firebolt has raised a total of $264M in funding over 4 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on 26th Jan 2022 from a Series C round.
• Holistics is business intelligence (BI) software with an analytics operations focus, making it easy for data teams to maintain. Non-technical users can explore data and build their own dashboards without the need to know SQL.Holistics provides a data modeling layer that is easy for any data team to adopt (native SQL) and cuts down repetitive mundane work traditionally required to maintain a self-service BI platform. Category: Business Intelligence.

Good reads and resources

• How to Measure the ROI of Your Data Team?: Quantifying the performance of data teams has always been hard. This is mainly because they act in support of operational teams and the impact that they have on the growth of the organisation is indirect which makes it difficult to define KPIs against which their performance can be measured. In this article, Louise de Leyritz has shared some tips from top data leaders as to how can you can measure the ROI of your data teams.
• An early-stage founder’s guide to building out your data stack: Navigating through the data landscape is a tough job, especially after the advent of hundreds of tools that try to solve multiple data-related problems. This surely can be overwhelming for any early-stage founder. After having hundreds of conversations with early-stage founders and data practitioners, Ryan Buick has summarised his learning and provided some recommendations on the best tools to solve your problems.
• The power of no-code data tools: There has been a significant shift toward no code and low code technologies in recent years, owing to a mismatch between the demand for extensive data analysis and the scarcity of competent data analysts. In this article, Aya Spencer has discussed in detail what are no-code and low code platforms, why she use to think no-code data tools weren’t that great, and why her opinion changed over time. She talks from the perspective of both data-scientist as well as a venture capitalist.
• Choosing the right North Star metrics to accelerate your business: Tracking business metrics is important, but choosing the right metric to track is whole another task. This is something that sounds simple but is actually quite easy to get wrong. Organisations strive to become data-driven but it's impossible to unlock the potential of your data if you aren’t tracking the right metrics. Read this article by James Elmore where he has discussed how to choose the right metric and how to avoid the most common pitfalls.
• Data Mesh w/ Zhamak Dehghani: Zhamak Dehghani joins Matt Housley and Joe Reis to chat about all things Data Mesh, and her new O'Reilly book by the same title.

Upcoming data events and webinars

• Datacamp is organising a webinar on "Impactful Data Engineering—with Datadog's Wouter de Bie" on Thursday, April 28, 11:00 am ET. In this webinar, Wouter de Bie provides an overview of data engineering, and the impact that good data engineering can have on an organization. Learn what makes data engineers successful, how to run a data engineering team, and what he looks out for when hiring data engineers. Register here.
• Analytics India Magazine is oragnising a virtual Data Engineering Summit'22 on 30th April 2022.DES'22 is India's first conference dedicated to the emerging & high in-demand field of data engineering. Focused on data engineering innovation, the virtual conference will give attendees direct access to top engineers & innovators from leading tech companies who will talk about the software deployment architecture of ML systems, and how to produce the latest data frameworks and solutions for business use cases. Register here.
• Acceldata is organising a webinar on "Five Key Criteria Needed to Evaluate Data Observability Applications" on 4th May @ 11 am PT. Join this webinar to learn what 5 criteria, according to the Eckerson Group, data teams should use to evaluate data observability products. Register here.

Data startup funding news

RelationalAI raised $75M in Series B round of fundingRelationalAI is a next-generation database system for intelligent data applications based on relational knowledge graphs. This round of funding was led by Tiger Global, Madrona Venture Group, and Addition, and Menlo Ventures. Read the full story here

MDS Jobs

Convoy is hiring a ‘Business Intelligence Engineer’. Check out Convoy’s Data Stack here. Location- Remote. Apply here

Form Energy is hiring a ‘Senior Analytics Engineer’. Data Stack- Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, Dagster. Location- US (Hybrid). Apply here

Clever is hiring a ‘Senior Data Engineer’. Data Stack- Stitch, Segment, dbt, Snowflake, Amplitude. Location- Remote, US. Apply here

Ebury is hiring a ‘Data Analyst’. Check out Ebury’s data stack here. Location- Spain, Remote. Apply here

Carrot Fertility is hiring a ‘Data Engineer’. Data Stack- Fivetran, dbt, Snowflake, Looker. Location- Remote. Apply here

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