The tale of a Data Analyst who evolves into an Analytics Engineer and resources so you can use to be like her. — Analytics Engineer is a new position coined (and made possible) by dbt. If a Data Engineer (DE) marries a Data Analyst (DA) and they have a baby girl, that baby girl will be an Analytics Engineer (AE). Well, it does not work that way, but you get the point.

I often get asked this question: I learnt the basics of SQL; what now? My answer is: Start using SQL to answer real-world business questions. — One of the tricky things about learning anything is getting from theoretical to practical. I’m from Vietnam, where learning how to drive is nightmarish. Seriously, look up “Vietnam traffic,” and you will know what I mean. …

SQL is easy to learn and can be used in various business applications. It is a powerful language used for data analysis in business. With little effort, everyone can learn to use SQL. What is SQL, and what does it do? SQL (pronounced “sequel” or “S-Q-L”) stands for Structured Query Language. It is a standard computer language that…

Learn how to modify the dbt code used by Airbyte to partition and cluster BigQuery tables. — Originally published here. As your business grows, the size of your BigQuery tables will inevitably grow as well. Scanning entire tables to answer business questions will become slower and more expensive as a result. Fortunately, modern data warehouses provide options to limit how much data each query scans.

Some basic concepts and project structure to help you get started with a dbt project. — For analysts not from a technical background, working with dbt can be intimidating at first. Writing codes to configure everything takes some time to get used to, especially if you are used to setting everything up using a UI. If you consider dbt for your team or just started with…

A Guide to staying focus in today’s distracted world—a review of Deep Work by Cal Newport. We are living in a connected world, where the pace of innovation is astonishing. Never before do we have access to so much information and can easily connect to others within seconds. The fourth…

What to know in terms of security when setting up a data environment in BigQuery. — We have all seen and heard about data breaches and the damages, both in terms of financial and reputation, that they can inflict. As we rely more and more on our data to make better decisions, data is becoming a critical asset for any organization. …

Video games don’t deserve the bad raps they often get. Here are the ones that shaped me (literally and figuratively). The first video game ever created was all the way back in 1958. Since then, the global gaming market has grown tremendously and is worth USD 173.70 billion in 2020…

How to (and not to) deploy dbt to production. — With the rise of the Modern Data Stack, more and more people use dbt as the main tool for data transformations, aka data modeling. The folks at Fishtown create an amazing dbt Cloud offering that suits the needs of data teams, large and small. With dbt Cloud, any Analyst, seasoned…