The newbie cloud architect diary

Tableau Desktop is  a powerful BI tool for the Data Warehouse. Tableau Prep is a promising but less mature product for  cleansing  new Datasets. The weekly mood This the end of my first quarter working as a full-time Architect. During this period, I had the opportunity to deep-dive into different topics such as DevOps, API and Data Management. It feels like a year from a content perspective, but actually not more than a month from a collaborative standpoint. Indeed, it has been and it is still a challenge for me to connect with other people within a distributed organisation and a world of pandemic. And as I am currently gaining visibility through a Data Lake project, I remind that as for my previous position (I've been working for years as a Solution Engineer), this Architect role might be sometimes very unclear, difficult to endorse and align with other people's expectation. Architecture is a double-edge. It brings people together around  Software design principles ...

A star schema is the simplest style of data mart schema and is the approach most widely used to develop data warehouses and dimensional data marts. The weekly mood My role as a cloud architect is slowing transiting from supporter to enabler . As a supporter, you might make some background noise, but you are not really part of the game, worse you are not part of the staff. That's perfect to observe and learn. Now as an enabler, you might indirectly influence or  contribute to  activities. Enablers are for example advisers and trainers. They aren't working on the field or taking decisions on the border, but they are a useful part of the staff, and feel rewarded by its achievements. In a previous post , we introduced the need to infer and flatten the source schema of some  MongoDB  collection, for the purpose of data analytics. In this article, we'll take intermediary tables aka. Staging area for granted. We will focus on defining the target schema , or the "ma...

Snowflake is a Cloud Data Warehouse that is comprehensive to use and probably belongs to the most successful cloud platforms over the last few years. The weekly mood This week slightly challenged my sense of responsibility and communication . It started with some (expected) sign of non-satisfaction from my manager, and ended with some (unexpected) sign of Leadership from me. In fact there are enough areas where I usually put enough of pressure on myself, like for example "delivering what I promised". However, I still definitely need a manager to motivate me for other areas like for example "making things happen". As an outcome, I am currently enjoying a much better team work around our Data Lake project and API Gateway evaluation. It's a shame that this would probably not happen without an external trigger, but that's also the essence of Lifelong learning . This experience reflects the common mistake that people make when focusing on results rather than on o...

Curve fitting is probably one of the key enabler for data analysis. It helps understanding historical datasets, recognize patterns and take action. The weekly mood I took a couple of days off to visit my parents. I had not seen them for the last 7 months, not only because of the 8 hours drive required to reach their place, but also because of the sanity restrictions introduced with COVID-19. Given some increasing expectations from my job, I found that moving my blogging activity from posts that used to come out almost on a daily basis would be more realistic on a weekly basis.   Following to the  Garmin's outage  that happened during the week-end, I shortly came to think again about my Strava segment effort analysis topic. Although I was quite satisfied about the status of my previous post , I had to admit that comparing segment efforts "only" through average power by average grade is probably not enough for creating a performance indicator. Performance range My...