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OneLake’s 30% Performance Tax: The Strategic Cost of Microsoft’s Unified Data Vision

Microsoft’s OneLake promises unified data access but delivers a 20-30% performance penalty for non-Fabric engines. This deep dive exposes the Redirect/Proxy API architecture creating a two-tier system that nudges enterprises toward ecosystem lock-in.

#azure-data-lake#cloud-lock-in#microsoft-fabric...

case-studies

Microservices Won’t Save You: The Hard Lessons from Shopify’s Modular Monolith and Discord’s ScyllaDB Migration

A deep dive into real-world system evolution, including Shopify’s journey with a modular monolith and Discord’s move from Cassandra to ScyllaDB, revealing practical trade-offs in scalability and maintainability.

#case-studies#database-migration#microservices...

data-ingestion

The AI Data Ingestion Gold Rush: Most Are Digging in the Wrong Place

Data engineers are throwing LLMs at ingestion pipelines, but production-grade wins are rare. Here’s where AI actually delivers value, and where it creates expensive new problems.

#data-ingestion#etl

data centers

AI’s Hidden Water Heist: Why the ‘It Just Evaporates’ Argument Is Draining Texas Dry

The viral Reddit debate about AI water consumption reveals a dangerous misunderstanding of how data centers extract value from local communities while hiding behind hydrological technicalities.

#data centers#environmental cost#sustainability...

AI engineering

AI Engineering Is Just Data Engineering in Disguise

AI engineering roles are largely rebranded data engineering jobs involving probabilistic data flows, prompt engineering as inputs, and embeddings as features. This perspective demystifies AI development and empowers data engineers to transition without panic or retraining.

#AI engineering#career transition#Data Engineering...

notebooks

Beyond #NotebookEverything: The Production Engineering Debt You Didn’t Know You Were Building

Jupyter notebooks revolutionized data exploration, but shipping them to production creates a silent reliability tax that compounds faster than your data grows. Here’s why the tools that accelerate development actively undermine operational excellence.

#notebooks#production-pipelines#reliability

data-governance

The WHERE Clause Documentation Gap: Where dbt’s Transparency Promise Breaks Down

#data-governance#dbt#documentation

duckdb

DuckDB in Production: The Embedded Database Challenging Enterprise Data Dogma

Real engineering teams are running DuckDB in production, cutting costs by 70% and outperforming Spark clusters. But is an embedded analytics database really ready for enterprise workloads, or are we just tired of overcomplicated data stacks?

#duckdb#motherduck#production

database

It’s 2026 and Postgres Already Won: The Database War No One Saw Coming

PostgreSQL didn’t just survive the specialized database boom, it assimilated it. Here’s how one database ate the entire data stack and why your polyglot persistence strategy is probably technical debt.

#database#postgresql#Scalability

caching-strategies

The CIA Deleted The World Factbook and Exposed Our Architectural Rot

When the CIA abruptly shuttered The World Factbook, it didn’t just remove a reference site, it revealed how fragile our data dependencies have become. Here’s what broke, why it matters, and how to architect for sovereignty.

#caching-strategies#data-sovereignty#external-dependencies...

cloud-analytics

MotherDuck’s 10x Price Hike: The $25 Analytics Dream Is Dead

MotherDuck’s elimination of its $25 Lite plan in favor of a $250 Business tier represents more than a price increase, it’s a fundamental shift away from serving small teams and solo analysts. Here’s what the data reveals about the alternatives and the future of affordable cloud analytics.

#cloud-analytics#cost-optimization#duckdb...

anti-patterns

Stop Increasing Kafka Message Limits, Your Architecture Is Screaming

Hitting Kafka’s message size limit isn’t a configuration problem to fix, it’s a design smell telling you your data flow architecture is fundamentally broken. Here’s what the infrastructure is trying to tell you.

#anti-patterns#kafka