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Business users want data that drives decisions. They want to know what happened, why it happened, and what to do about it — without learning a data model, mastering dimensional thinking, or writing and debugging SQL. That is the gap a good analyst closes. Analysts use both domain and technical knowledge to pull insights out of an organization’s data warehouse. LLMs offer a different path: connect the model to the warehouse via an MCP server, and the user gets answers without needing the analyst’s technical knowledge. ...

This is my personal 1990s moment: I’m starting a blog. And am I writing this in a café.1 I have a few thoughts behind this: Foremost, I like to write. I believe in the cliché that “clear writing is clear thinking”. Writing helps me organize my thoughts so that they are easy for others to follow. If I can do that, then I really understand a topic. Secondly, this is a way of giving back. I have had the good fortune to learn from many people. I have struggled with technical and non-technical of topics. I am hopeful that by recording what I have learned and the perspectives that I have developed, I can be useful to others. ...

The canonical texts on data warehousing — Kimball’s The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Inmon’s Building the Data Warehouse, and Linstedt’s Data Vault 2.0 — all describe warehouse layers in terms of sequence: source, staging, integration, presentation. Modern frameworks like dbt’s best practices guide continue this tradition. The sequence is correct, but the explanations are lacking. They prescribe the order and scope of transformation layers, but not the purpose of each layer. What’s missing is an account of what kind of correctness each layer enforces. Without that, decisions about what transformations belong in staging versus an intermediate layer feel arbitrary. Something “feels” wrong, but no guiding principle explains why. ...

We are two months into a presidential administration that is clearly making a break with past administrations. Many prominent observers like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich are calling this an authoritarian autogolpe, or self-coup. Of course, both of these observers are left of center, so being skeptical of these claims is a natural—and even prudent—reaction. After all, we have experienced 250 years of democratic government. On the other hand, maybe they are correct. Many of the stories coming out of Washington seem alarming and the sheer number of stories is overwhelming. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) shutting down agencies such as USAID. DOGE asking federal workers to justify the work they performed last week in an email or risk termination. Deciding how to think about this moment in light of emotionally charged claims and commentary is difficult. To not be sure what to think is completely understandable. ...