October 1, 2024

T-SQL Tuesday #179: What’s In Your Data Detective Toolkit?

Most of us who work with data have, at least a few times, been presented with a challenge to explore and attempt to make sense of a poorly-defined set of data. Often it’s a collection of text files or Excel documents without any context or documentation. In other cases, it’s a database with no data map or metadata to help…

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December 22, 2020

ETL Antipattern: Ignoring the “Why?”

In this final post in my ETL Antipatterns series, I’ll talk about a common big-picture mistake when building ETL processes: ignoring the fundamental question, “why are we doing this?” ETL Antipattern: ignoring the “why?” When I first began my consulting career more than ten years ago, most of my work was transactional. I’d be assigned to a project and would…