Barr

And how to avoid falling into the same trapsWith the right approach, data governance doesn’t have to be a headache. Image courtesy of Campaign Creators.Everywhere we go in the cloud data space today, we’re hearing one message loud and clear: “you should be thinking about data governance”. It’s a sentiment that we wholeheartedly endorse, but we like to take it a little bit further — you should be thinking about data governance differently.In this article, I’ll share six of the top reasons that we have seen data governance…

Ayla with her parents.Photo: CHEO Media HouseIn November, doctors in the U.S. and Canada reported a medical first. They were able to start treating a patient’s deadly genetic disease in the womb, seemingly helping to prevent the fatal complications that killed her siblings.Their patient—a young girl named Ayla—was diagnosed with Pompe disease, a rare condition that prevents people from breaking down stored glycogen in the body. Those with early onset Pompe often die or develop severe developmental problems within years,…

What’s in store for the future of data engineering? In this article, I share some of my topline predictions for 2023 — and beyond.End of the year prediction articles are hokey, but they serve a purpose. They help us rise above the daily grind and consider where to place our longer term bets.They also tend to be an exercise in humility as we try to paint a coherent “big picture” of an industry that is rapidly evolving in multiple directions. I challenge anyone to find an industry where more is required of its practitioners…

WASHINGTON—Tumult in the cryptocurrency market represents a red flag to the broader financial system, the Federal Reserve’s top banking regulator plans to tell lawmakers Tuesday, while pressing for tougher guardrails in the wake of the rapid collapse of crypto exchange FTX. Michael Barr, the Fed’s vice chairman for supervision, is expected to tell lawmakers that crypto-related activities need to be regulated in a manner similar to more traditional…

The data gatekeeper is dead, long live the…oh no what have we done?Photo by Nick Beer via Shutterstock.A silent alarm rings in my head whenever I hear someone utter the phrase, “data is everyone’s responsibility.”You can just as easily translate this to mean that “data is no one’s responsibility,” too. This, readers, is what I call the “data tragedy of the commons.”Here’s why.The term tragedy of the commons comes from economic science and refers to situations where a common set of resources is accessed without any strong…

Even with the most well-designed data platforms, systems will break. Without embracing risk, you’re playing with fire.Image courtesy of Daniel Jerez on Unsplash.Say it with me: broken data is inevitable.It doesn’t care about how proactive you are at writing dbt tests, how perfectly your data is modeled, or how robust your architecture is. The possibility of a major data incident (Null value? Errant schema change? Failed model?) that reverberates across the company is always lurking around the corner.That’s not to say…

| Scout Comics will be publishing a new The Maze Agency series written by Mike W. Barr, and now drawn by Silvano Beltramo. First published in 1988, the comic book focuses on private detectives Jennifer Mays and Gabriel Webb, a former CIA agent and a true-crime writer, respectively. Initially self-published, drawn by Alan Davis, it was picked up for a seven-issue series with art by Adam Hughes and Rick Magyar from Comico Comics for 7 issues in 1988. The title then moved to Innovation Comics for another 18 issues running…

Self-serve systems are a big priority for data leaders and a principle of nearly every modern data strategy, but what exactly does it mean?Photo by Onesix on UnsplashData self-service, the ability for stakeholders in the organization to answer their own business questions with data, is a top initiative for nearly every data leader I’ve spoken to this year.It’s so foundational to creating a data-driven organization, that most of the questions surrounding it focus on the “when” rather than the “why.”That’s why we were…

Or, defining what success looks like for data leadersImage courtesy of author.As analytics professionals, we deal in data: serving ad-hoc reports on a minute’s notice, pulling queries for executives, and generally forecasting company performance across a variety of metrics. But how can we be truly successful if we don’t measure our own performance, too?In this article, we discuss six important steps to setting goals for our own data teams, from taking time for exploration to avoiding vanity stats while maintaining a…

Innuendo aside, “big” data is getting smaller and faster. Data leaders need to adjust to the new paradigm.Image courtesy of Elur/Shutterstock.At some point in the last two decades, the size of our data became inextricably linked to our ego. The bigger the better.We watched enviously as FAANG companies talked about optimizing hundreds of petabyes in their data lakes or data warehouses.We imagined what it would be like to engineer at that scale. We started humblebragging at conferences, like weight lifters talking about…