Tips and tricks for data analysis, thoughts on the data industry, and updates from the Narrator team.
I never thought I’d be knee-deep in the data space, but here I am, leading the charge as the Head of Growth at a data startup. How did I get here? Well, I fell in love...
Ben Ahama
Feb 22, 2024
DATA ENGINEERING
Discover effective cost-saving strategies for data engineers to optimize incremental data processing. Learn how to overcome challenges and maximize the benefits of this powerful approach.
Brittany Davis
Aug 28, 2023
While big-picture metrics like total sales and annual recurring revenue (ARR) give you an overview, they don't provide the practical insights needed for real change.
Jul 7, 2023
Discover a new course from DeepSkyData that empowers product managers, data analysts, and analytics engineers to master the Activity Schema.
Jun 23, 2023
DATA ANALYSIS
While companies heavily rely on data to inform their strategies, the very data models they employ often hinder their ability to ask deep and insightful questions.
Jun 1, 2023
Explore a powerful approach that can revolutionize the way you understand and utilize data: modeling data as activities. Activities can bring clarity and organization to your data, allowing you to gain valuable insights and make the most of your data.
May 23, 2023
No data is perfect, and data quality practices and processes are absolutely critical to put in place before any analysis can be performed.
Ahmed Elsamadisi
Aug 25, 2022
A realistic way to estimate warehouse cost and techniques to prevent the warehouse cost from getting out of hand.
Jul 6, 2022
Syncing product analytics data into your warehouse is more expensive than you might think. This explains why, and what to do about it.
Jun 27, 2022
Amplitude and Snowflake's partnership is a great first pass at warehouse-powered data analytics. However, this sync is missing many data team requirements for a complex and secure production data system.
Matt Star
Jun 14, 2022
For the past few years at Narrator, I’ve been collecting the bad data questions I often stumble upon and reflecting on how to make them better. This simple exercise, done regularly for a few years, significantly improved the quality of questions I ask.
Jun 8, 2022
Last week at Narrator, we did an interesting product thinking exercise that reminded me of the incredible value of constantly going back to the customer and reasoning from there, so I thought I’d share what it was and why it ended up being so valuable for us.
May 10, 2022
A simple yet effective mental model I use to turn a vague stakeholder request into something that can be analyzed with data.
Apr 30, 2022
DATA SCIENCE
Most blogs in data science are like most people at a cocktail party: they talk news, weather, or politics, and do not venture into deep, interesting subjects. I provide a list of blogs that do.
Vasili Shynkarenka
Apr 13, 2022
Why star schema is set up for failure What is star schema? Star schema [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_schema] is the most common approach to data modeling — primarily made up of fact and dimension tables.
Mar 18, 2022
The simplicity of modeling slowly changing dimensions in an Activity Schema vs a Star Schema
Feb 9, 2022
Systematically identify bot users in your web traffic with a simple SQL query.
Jan 24, 2022
PMs use data to prioritize, align their team, and communicate the impact of their work. How does this work in practice?
Nov 15, 2021
How deploying data governance can bring meaning to your data and accelerate your digital transformation.
Sanjiv Prasad
Sep 22, 2021
Why data-informed decisions are more important than broad access to data for self service analytics
Sep 1, 2021
A heuristic approach for using correlations to inform decisions
Aug 11, 2021
Will business users ever be able to ask ad hoc questions without involving data teams? Narrator’s self-service analytics solution is the answer.
Kendall Garey
Jul 13, 2021
In a recent podcast of Sources and Destinations, our CEO Ahmed talks about data engineering, industry confusions and what is it really like to be a data-driven company.
Alliza Reyes
Jul 9, 2021
SQL
DATEDIFF is an extremely useful function for analytical queries. Given two timestamps it'll tell you how many days, weeks, months, hours, etc they are apart. Here we show an implementation of this function for Postgres.
Jun 28, 2021
MARKETING
Learn how we’ve been able to get 95% identity attribution to devices and modern browsers in a world of cookie consent banners and privacy-first updates.
Jun 16, 2021
We've been using shared data analyses in production for three years. Here's how you can create reusable templates for common metrics and analyses.
Jun 11, 2021
Data democratization usually means simple dashboards. Here's how to safely give stakeholders the ability to ask any question
Sarah Krasnik
May 21, 2021
With some tweaking Postgres can be a great data warehouse. Here's how to configure it.
May 10, 2021
How to know if you're ready for a modern data platform built on a data warehouse.
Apr 28, 2021
Having a data dictionary is really a symptom of a complex data modeling layer. With a simpler layer it's possible to avoid maintaining a dictionary altogether.
Jamie MacKillop
Mar 8, 2021
5 startups share a story of how they arrived at an interesting insight using their data.
Mar 2, 2021
How to generate timestamps in SQL that match realistic user behavior data.
Feb 18, 2021
Understanding what Customer Lifetime Value is, why it's a useful metric, and how to compute it.
Feb 2, 2021
How to generate a sequence of integers for most data warehouses, including Postgres, Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, and Azure SQL
Jan 19, 2021
Make sure your data analysis is actionable by asking this one question before getting started.
Jan 13, 2021
The most robust and simple way to sync between production systems is to use your warehouse as the single source of truth
Jan 4, 2021
The data-driven way to choose an attribution model
Dec 21, 2020
Dec 15, 2020
Sep 16, 2020
Sep 9, 2020
Sep 8, 2020
A cautionary tale of a data analysis, a dashboard, and a huge waste of resources
