Data and analytics

News Databricks can now query Workday HR and finance data in place, without copying it

The beta connector reads Workday's shared Iceberg tables directly and keeps Workday as the system of record. Access is read-only.

Avery Lane · October 11, 2026 · 2 min read

News Cloudflare's Basin data platform is generally available, with no egress fees

Pipelines, Catalog and SQL are now one product built on Apache Iceberg and R2 storage. You pay when data is ingested, processed or queried, and egress is free.

Avery Lane · October 11, 2026 · 2 min read

Explainer Real-time analytics: when streaming data is worth it, and how it works

Real-time analytics answers questions while there is still time to act on them. It also costs more to build and run, so the first job is deciding which questions need it.

Avery Lane · July 31, 2026 · 2 min read

Guide Seven data analysis mistakes that lead to bad business decisions

Most analysis mistakes aren't about math. They come from asking the wrong question of the data, or reading more into a result than it can support.

Avery Lane · July 29, 2026 · 2 min read

Guide Data management best practices: a practical checklist built on DAMA's framework

Data management covers eleven areas in the industry's standard framework. A mid-size company doesn't need all of them at once. Here is where to start.

Avery Lane · July 28, 2026 · 3 min read

Explainer Big data platforms in 2026: the lakehouse, Spark and open table formats

Big data no longer means running a Hadoop cluster. It means cheap object storage, an open table format, and whichever engines you want to query it with.

Avery Lane · February 28, 2025 · 2 min read

Explainer Modern BI vs traditional BI: what changed, and what to keep

Traditional BI put IT between the business and its data. Modern BI removed that bottleneck and created a new problem: five dashboards with five different revenue figures.

Avery Lane · January 13, 2025 · 2 min read

Explainer The EU Data Act is now in force: what it changes for device data and cloud switching

Europe's Data Act turns data from connected products into something users can demand, and makes leaving a cloud provider cheaper. Companies selling into the EU have obligations either way.

Avery Lane · December 2, 2024 · 3 min read

Explainer Data lake or data warehouse: which one your company needs

A warehouse holds cleaned data built for reporting. A lake holds raw data of every kind for whoever needs it later. Most companies end up needing both.

Avery Lane · November 4, 2024 · 3 min read

Guide Big data for mid-size companies: where it pays off and how to start

Big data projects fail more often from vague goals than from technology. The ones that pay off start with one decision the business wants to make better.

Avery Lane · September 2, 2024 · 2 min read

Explainer Data integration explained: ETL, ELT, change data capture and reverse ETL

Every report, dashboard and AI project depends on getting data out of business systems and into one place. There are four main ways to do it.

Avery Lane · August 21, 2024 · 2 min read