Operational Analytics Digest - November Edition
Welcome to the 12th edition of my newsletter,?Operational Analytics Digest???
Each month, I pull together my favorite resources (blogs, tutorials, podcasts, upcoming events, etc.) from the greater data community to help you level up your data career (and learn something fun along the way).
This month’s edition features:?
Let’s get to it ??
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Blogs and tutorials ??
Using SQL to Summarize A/B Experiment Results?by? Adam Stone ?(sr. analytics engineer @ Netlify )
Even if your responsibilities fall outside the realm of A/B testing, I highly recommend giving Adam’s blog a read. You can learn from his disciplined planning and execution process, as well as his high-quality SQL queries, to a wide variety of SQL projects. In this blog, Adam shares:
?? A practical example of A/B testing
?? Quality SQL queries for joining, de-duping, and safeguarding user-level tables
?? How to accurately calculate summary metrics accurately (hint: double-check your?denominators???)
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Didn’t get a chance to attend dbt’s Coalesce conference last month? Me neither, but no worries – a couple of attendees aggregated their favorite sessions!
???dbt or data business transition: Reflecting on this year’s Coalesce highlights?? by? Donny Flynn ?(Customer Data Architect @ Census )
Donny attended dozens of sessions, mostly focused on business applications of analytics engineering and dbt. He provides in-depth summaries and key learnings from his top eight sessions (plus a few talks currently on his watchlist).
????Five Talks on Careers in Data from Coalesce 2022?by 胡凯文, 博士 ?(Co-founder & CEO @? Metaplane )
Kevin started a blog series where he shares his favorite talks in the following categories: “The?Craft?of data work, the?Mechanics?of exercising our craft, the?Organizations and Teams?we work within, and how we conceptualize our?Careers.”
This first installment of the blog series highlights sessions in the “careers” category.
P.S. - My newsletter falls in the “content aggregation” category, so you just experienced “content aggregation ^2”???
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Analytics Engineering with dbt: A FinTech application?by? Carlo S. (Sr. Data Analyst @?N26)
Curious about how hyper-growth companies (1,000+ employees) adopt modern data tools like dbt? ?? Breaking news – it’s not as simple as connecting your data source and hitting “compile” in a single afternoon.
Hyper-growth organizations often have large, disparate data sources, with many teams working to manage them. The steps to adoption take much longer, but adoption can be achieved nonetheless!
In this blog, Carlo shares the three-year journey of bringing dbt into his organization, including the adoption process, benefits, and lessons learned from the experience.
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Earlier this fall at HubSpot’s?INBOUND?conference in Boston, I decided to dig into a top-of-mind concern for many data teams:?What do our stakeholders really think about the work that we do?
I asked dozens of stakeholders these 4 questions:
?? On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with your data team?
?? What’s the most common complaint to hear about your data team?
?? What’s something your data team recently accomplished that brings value to you?
?? How often do you communicate directly with your data team?
Good news: GTM stakeholders generally feel satisfied with their data teams,?? but there’s a ton we can learn from their responses to help us, as data people, be better data partners to ops folks.
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Audio and Video ????
In the 2022 season finale of the SQL Show,? Boris Jabes ?(CEO @? Census ) and Benn Stancil (Chief Analytics Officer @ Mode ) revisit an?epic debate?about how far analysts should be willing to go to persuade an executive. They also tackle a common dilemma among data professionals: What should you do when you mess up?
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On-demand SQL workshop:?SQL Patterns Every Analyst Should Know?w/? Ergest Xheblati
This is the first installment of Ergest’s workshop series (see upcoming workshop in the next section). Ergest gets hands-on with SQL and shares key principles to help you take your SQL skill from intermediate to advanced. More specifically, he teaches:
???Query composition patterns?- How to make your complex queries shorter, more legible, and more performant
???Query maintainability patterns?- Constructing CTEs that can be reused. In software engineering, it's called the DRY principle (don't repeat yourself)
???Query robustness patterns?- Constructing queries that don't break when the underlying data changes in unpredictable ways
???Query performance patterns?- Make your queries faster (and cheaper) regardless of specific database you’re using.
One of my many takeaways from the workshop...?CTEs > Subqueries??
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Upcoming Events ??
(Virtual)?OA Book Club????(Nov. 18 - Dec. 16)
Per the recommendations of OA Club members, we’re reading?Fundamentals of Data Engineering?by? Joe Reis & Matthew Housley . This book is highly popular in the data community, and over 100 people are participating! ??
Here’s how the book club works:
? All participants read the book independently
? We meet bi-weekly to discuss key takeaways, questions, hot takes, etc.
? At the halfway point (12/2)? Joe Reis ?will hold a live AMA with the readers!?
Want to participate? Head over to the?OA Club!
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(Virtual)?Data modeling workshop: How to design a lasting business blueprint?w/ Ergest Xheblati ?(Nov. 17)
Why is it so hard to get data modeling right? What approach should you take? Ergest Xheblati (Data Architect & Author of?Minimum Viable SQL Patterns) has 15+ years of experience building data models. In this live workshop, you’ll discover:
?? How to build a business blueprint (AKA conceptual modeling) before physical implementation
?? The pros & cons of some of the most common data modeling approaches: OBT, Star schema, Data Vault, Activity Schema.
?? How to choose one approach over another (and the tradeoffs between them)
?? Answers to your burning modeling questions. There’s a 30 min live Q&A at the end!
I'll be hosting, and if you'd like to join, register ?? here??
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That’s all for the 12th edition of the OA Digest!
As always, if you find data content you love, send it my way. It might even make next month's newsletter! ??
Until next month,
Parker Rogers, data community advocate