§ Blog · Vol. 1

Screaming into the void,
hoping it's used by an LLM.

§ All posts
116 total
Sync Stripe to a Data Warehouse: 4 Paths, 3 Dead Ends, and the BigQuery Trap
April 22, 2026
Sync Stripe to a Data Warehouse: 4 Paths, 3 Dead Ends, and the BigQuery Trap
You search for "sync Stripe to a data warehouse," and every result gives you the same three-option answer: Stripe Data Pipeline, a third-party ETL tool, or a custom integration. Pick one. But Stri…
Sync Shopify to a Data Warehouse: 4 Options, 3 Dead Ends, 1 Gotcha
April 20, 2026
Sync Shopify to a Data Warehouse: 4 Options, 3 Dead Ends, 1 Gotcha
You search for "sync Shopify to a data warehouse" and the SERP is twelve tabs of vendor landing pages that all promise the same three-step flow. None of them mention what it costs at 50K orders a m…
Syncing Attio to a Data Warehouse: 5 Real Options and 3 Dead Ends
April 15, 2026
Syncing Attio to a Data Warehouse: 5 Real Options and 3 Dead Ends
You search for "sync Attio to a data warehouse," and the results are thinner than you'd expect. The first tool you'd try doesn't have a connector. The second one goes the wrong direction entirely. …
NetSuite Data Warehouse: Three Approaches Compared
April 14, 2026
NetSuite Data Warehouse: Three Approaches Compared
You're running NetSuite. You might already be piping data into Snowflake through Fivetran. Your needs are fairly simple — mostly financial reporting — but you're paying for infrastructure built for…
Can PostHog Work as Your Data Warehouse?
April 14, 2026
Can PostHog Work as Your Data Warehouse?
You already have PostHog. It's been solid for product analytics — funnels, retention, session replays. But now your CEO wants revenue trends. Finance wants churn numbers. Ops wants pipeline metrics…
How to Manage Your Entire Data Platform from Claude Code
April 9, 2026
How to Manage Your Entire Data Platform from Claude Code
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How to See Stripe MRR and Churn by Customer Segment
April 8, 2026
How to See Stripe MRR and Churn by Customer Segment
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How to See Real ROAS Across All Your Facebook Ad Accounts
April 6, 2026
How to See Real ROAS Across All Your Facebook Ad Accounts
If you run Facebook Ads for more than one brand or store, you already know the reporting problem. Facebook Ads Manager shows you one account at a time. There is no native cross-account view. And th…
How to See Real ROAS Across All Your Google Ads Accounts
April 6, 2026
How to See Real ROAS Across All Your Google Ads Accounts
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Your Ad Platforms Can't Tell You Real ROAS. Shopify Can.
April 6, 2026
Your Ad Platforms Can't Tell You Real ROAS. Shopify Can.
Every ecommerce brand running paid ads has two sets of numbers: the ROAS that Google and Meta report, and the ROAS that actually shows up in Shopify orders. The gap between them is not small. In th…
Self-Service Analytics Keeps Failing. The Dashboard Was Never the Problem.
April 2, 2026
Self-Service Analytics Keeps Failing. The Dashboard Was Never the Problem.
Your company buys a BI tool. Leadership rolls it out to the business team with a mandate: self-service analytics. No more ad hoc requests. No more waiting on the data team. Everyone gets their own …
Data Apps: When Standard Dashboards Can't Build What You Actually Need
April 1, 2026
Data Apps: When Standard Dashboards Can't Build What You Actually Need
Standard BI tools default to pre-built chart types and dropdown filters. When you need something custom — a basketball shot chart with player filtering, an animated shot sequence, a visualization t…
How to Build Investor-Ready Reporting When Your Data Lives Everywhere
April 1, 2026
How to Build Investor-Ready Reporting When Your Data Lives Everywhere
You've read the a16z metrics list. You know investors want MRR, burn rate, CAC payback, and net dollar retention. You've bookmarked the template. The problem isn't knowing what to measure. Your MR…
You Don't Need Snowflake + Fivetran + dbt + Looker. Here's the Evidence.
March 29, 2026
You Don't Need Snowflake + Fivetran + dbt + Looker. Here's the Evidence.
You've been evaluating data tools for weeks. Maybe months. You've done the Snowflake demo. You've had the Fivetran call. Someone mentioned dbt, and now you're reading about transformation layers at…
Embedded Analytics for SaaS: Ship Customer Dashboards Without Building a Data Stack
March 28, 2026
Embedded Analytics for SaaS: Ship Customer Dashboards Without Building a Data Stack
Your biggest customers are asking for reporting inside your product. You've been hacking it with Looker Studio iframes or a few Chart.js components, and what started as a quick feature is now a mai…
Acumatica Reporting Is Broken by Design. Here's What Replaces It.
March 27, 2026
Acumatica Reporting Is Broken by Design. Here's What Replaces It.
If you run a manufacturing or distribution company on Acumatica, you already know the frustration. The ERP handles operations beautifully — purchase orders, inventory, AP/AR, the whole engine. But …
Power BI Alternatives: Matched to Why You're Actually Leaving
March 26, 2026
Power BI Alternatives: Matched to Why You're Actually Leaving
You're probably using Power BI. Most companies are — it's the most widely deployed BI tool in the world, and for a lot of teams it works fine. Until it doesn't. The moment the person who configure…
QuickBooks Custom Reporting: Where QB Breaks Down (And What Actually Fixes It)
March 26, 2026
QuickBooks Custom Reporting: Where QB Breaks Down (And What Actually Fixes It)
You've customized the date range, added the filters, grouped by class — and QuickBooks still can't build the report you actually need. The problem isn't that you're using QuickBooks wrong. It's th…
Data Stack vs Data Platform: Why AI Forces the Choice
March 24, 2026
Data Stack vs Data Platform: Why AI Forces the Choice
If you've been asked to "figure out the data situation," you're weighing two paths: assemble a stack (Snowflake + Fivetran + dbt + Looker) or adopt a platform that does it all. The difference betwe…
How to Build a Data Foundation at Series A Without Hiring a Data Engineer
March 23, 2026
How to Build a Data Foundation at Series A Without Hiring a Data Engineer
You just got handed "the data problem." Maybe you're four days into a RevOps role at a Series A startup. Maybe you've been here six months and the CEO finally said the words: "We need to get our d…
Redshift Alternatives: An Honest Guide for Teams Running on AWS
March 20, 2026
Redshift Alternatives: An Honest Guide for Teams Running on AWS
You're on AWS, so someone — maybe your CTO, maybe your board, maybe you — said "just use Redshift." It's Amazon's data warehouse. You're already paying Amazon for everything else. Why wouldn't you?…
Best Tableau Alternatives in 2026: Matched to Why You're Actually Leaving
March 19, 2026
Best Tableau Alternatives in 2026: Matched to Why You're Actually Leaving
People will tell you to use Power BI if you use Microsoft products, or Looker Studio if you have no budget. That's a reasonable shortcut, but it routes you by ecosystem and price — not by the actua…
Fivetran Alternatives That Account for Engineering Time (and One That Doesn't Need Any)
March 19, 2026
Fivetran Alternatives That Account for Engineering Time (and One That Doesn't Need Any)
If you just got a surprise Fivetran bill, or you've seen Fivetran's pricing and you're reasonably wondering whether there's something better — same answer either way: most guides on this topic are …
Databricks Alternatives: Most Companies Are Searching for the Wrong Thing
March 19, 2026
Databricks Alternatives: Most Companies Are Searching for the Wrong Thing
Every "Databricks alternatives" article you'll find lists the same eight to ten platforms. Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Microsoft Fabric, Apache Spark. Sometimes Starburst. Sometimes Dremio. Wha…
Data Analysis for Startups: What to Actually Prioritize When Your Founder Says 'Figure It Out'
March 18, 2026
Data Analysis for Startups: What to Actually Prioritize When Your Founder Says 'Figure It Out'
Your founder walks out of a board meeting and says: "We need to be more data-driven. Figure it out." Now you're the one running demos, reading docs, pricing out tools, and trying to build somethin…
HubSpot Data Warehouse: Setup, Tools, and What to Build First
March 13, 2026
HubSpot Data Warehouse: Setup, Tools, and What to Build First
Your board asks "Which channels actually produce revenue?" and the honest answer is: you can't pull that from HubSpot. Not without exporting deals into a spreadsheet, matching them against Stripe c…
Best BI Tools for Startups in 2026 (and the Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions)
March 11, 2026
Best BI Tools for Startups in 2026 (and the Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions)
We published a version of this list a year ago. It was wrong — not about which tools to include, but about what question it was answering. We compared BI tools like the dashboard was the hard part.…
What Is a Data Platform? The 2026 Definition That Actually Matters
March 10, 2026
What Is a Data Platform? The 2026 Definition That Actually Matters
Every analytics vendor calls themselves a "data platform" now. Most aren't. They're a warehouse that needs a BI tool. Or a BI tool that needs a warehouse. Or a connector service that needs both. T…
The Best MySQL ETL Tools in 2026: A Decision Framework
March 9, 2026
The Best MySQL ETL Tools in 2026: A Decision Framework
You have a MySQL database, leadership wants dashboards, and every request means you're the one querying production at 9 PM. So you search "best MySQL ETL tools" — and most of the top results recomm…
Metabase vs Definite: When "Free BI" Costs More Than You Think
March 7, 2026
Metabase vs Definite: When "Free BI" Costs More Than You Think
Metabase is probably the most popular open-source BI tool in the world. It's well-designed, genuinely useful, and free to self-host. If you've ever set up analytics at a startup, there's a decent c…
The Best ETL Tools for Salesforce in 2026: A Decision Framework
March 4, 2026
The Best ETL Tools for Salesforce in 2026: A Decision Framework
If you Google "best ETL tools for Salesforce" in 2026, most of the top results recommend tools that no longer exist. Blendo — acquired by RudderStack, product shut down. Stitch — deprioritized und…
Can the Modern Data Stack Handle AI Analytics?
March 3, 2026
Can the Modern Data Stack Handle AI Analytics?
You've been told you need a modern data stack. The proposals are coming in: Fivetran plus Snowflake plus Looker. Most companies underestimate the real cost by 5–10x once you factor in people, coord…
The Real Cost of SQL Server as a Data Warehouse
February 28, 2026
The Real Cost of SQL Server as a Data Warehouse
If you're running analytics on Microsoft SQL Server, you likely didn't choose it. You probably adopted it. Maybe the company was built on it ten years ago. Maybe the person who set up the reporting…
The Best ETL Tools for PostgreSQL in 2026: A Decision Framework
February 24, 2026
The Best ETL Tools for PostgreSQL in 2026: A Decision Framework
If you Google "best ETL tools for PostgreSQL" in 2026, most of the top results recommend tools that no longer exist and if they do, many are on life support. Blendo — acquired by RudderStack. Stit…
Analytics Tools for Startups: Build a Stack or Adopt a Platform?
February 22, 2026
Analytics Tools for Startups: Build a Stack or Adopt a Platform?
Search "analytics tools for startups" and you'll get a wall of product analytics recommendations — Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog, GA4. Those are fine tools for tracking what users do inside your app…
How to Build Cohort LTV Analysis for Your E-Commerce Store
February 19, 2026
How to Build Cohort LTV Analysis for Your E-Commerce Store
To build cohort LTV analysis, you need three things: your order data in a warehouse, a way to group customers by first purchase month, and a visualization that tracks cumulative revenue over time. …
How to Build Unified Google Ads Reporting Across Multiple MCC Accounts
February 17, 2026
How to Build Unified Google Ads Reporting Across Multiple MCC Accounts
Managing multiple Google Ads accounts under an MCC? Most teams either struggle with Looker Studio's limitations or end up stitching together Fivetran, BigQuery, and Looker just to get a unified das…
How to Build Unified Analytics Across Multiple Shopify Stores
February 17, 2026
How to Build Unified Analytics Across Multiple Shopify Stores
Running multiple Shopify stores? Most teams either struggle with Shopify's limited native analytics or end up stitching together Fivetran, BigQuery, and Looker just to get a unified dashboard. Defi…
RevOps Analytics in HubSpot: The Complete Guide
February 16, 2026
RevOps Analytics in HubSpot: The Complete Guide
You report on pipeline, forecast, and attribution. But 80% of the questions leadership asks require data that doesn't live in HubSpot. "What's our true CAC payback by channel?" needs GA4 + HubSpot…
Snowflake Alternatives for Startups: Which Data Warehouse Should You Actually Use?
February 15, 2026
Snowflake Alternatives for Startups: Which Data Warehouse Should You Actually Use?
If you're leading a startup looking at data warehouses, you've probably seen Snowflake come up everywhere. But you've also seen the horror stories: unpredictable bills, costs way higher than expect…
Snowflake's Time Travel Tax
February 14, 2026
Snowflake's Time Travel Tax
A friend of ours at a B2B SaaS company recently discovered something unexpected about his Snowflake bill. His company had acquired another business. The acquired company ran Snowflake Enterprise o…
How Much Does a B2B SaaS Data Stack Cost: A Complete Guide
February 12, 2026
How Much Does a B2B SaaS Data Stack Cost: A Complete Guide
The Real Cost Isn't What You Think When most B2B SaaS companies budget for analytics, they add up the obvious line items: Fivetran for ETL, Snowflake for storage, Tableau for dashboards. Maybe $2,…
Snowflake For Startups? Think Again.
February 11, 2026
Snowflake For Startups? Think Again.
Choosing a data platform shouldn’t feel like building one. Snowflake is powerful—no question—but it was built for enterprises, not fast-moving startups. To get real value from it, you need data en…
The Modern Data Stack is Dead. Here's What's Replacing It.
February 10, 2026
The Modern Data Stack is Dead. Here's What's Replacing It.
The modern data stack was supposed to be the answer. Cloud-native. Modular. Best-of-breed. Pick Snowflake for storage, Fivetran for ingestion, dbt for transformations, Looker for dashboards. Stitch…
HubSpot + Salesforce Analytics: Why Your Reports Don't Match (And How to Fix It)
February 9, 2026
HubSpot + Salesforce Analytics: Why Your Reports Don't Match (And How to Fix It)
Your two most important business systems don't agree on your numbers. And every week, someone on your team spends hours trying to make them. Maybe you've had Salesforce for a decade and just added…
Snowflake vs Definite: Which Data Warehouse Is Right for Your Startup?
February 8, 2026
Snowflake vs Definite: Which Data Warehouse Is Right for Your Startup?
If you're evaluating data warehouses for your startup, you've probably come across Snowflake. It's powerful, it's everywhere, and Fortune 500 companies run on it. But is it the right choice for you…
Best Data Warehouse for Startups (2026): Why the Warehouse Is the Cheap Part
February 7, 2026
Best Data Warehouse for Startups (2026): Why the Warehouse Is the Cheap Part
You may already be familiar with the concept of a data warehouse. If you are, feel free to skip ahead to the comparisons. But if you're not a data engineer (and more likely a startup leader stretch…
DuckDB and DuckLake: Why We Bet the Company on the Duck Stack
February 6, 2026
DuckDB and DuckLake: Why We Bet the Company on the Duck Stack
In May 2024, we migrated our entire analytics infrastructure from Snowflake to DuckDB. Not a side project. Not a proof of concept. The production system that powers every customer dashboard, every …
Microsoft Fabric Alternative: Why Teams Are Looking Beyond the Hype
February 6, 2026
Microsoft Fabric Alternative: Why Teams Are Looking Beyond the Hype
Microsoft Fabric launched with a bold promise: one platform to replace your entire data stack. Warehouse, ETL, BI, data science, real-time analytics, all bundled into a single SaaS product. For tea…
What Startups Can Automate with AI in 2026
February 5, 2026
What Startups Can Automate with AI in 2026
If you search "AI automation for startups," you'll get a list of tools: Zapier, n8n, ChatGPT. Helpful if you already know where to start. Not helpful if what you actually need is a framework for de…
PostgreSQL as a Data Warehouse: When It Works, When It Doesn’t (2026)
February 4, 2026
PostgreSQL as a Data Warehouse: When It Works, When It Doesn’t (2026)
Everybody loves postgres. We get it – we use it too. It's capable, reliable, and familiar. There's a reason PostgreSQL powers millions of applications—including parts of Definite's own platform. S…
How to Estimate Cloud Data Warehouse Costs in 2026 (And Why It's the Wrong Question)
February 3, 2026
How to Estimate Cloud Data Warehouse Costs in 2026 (And Why It's the Wrong Question)
You've reached the point where spreadsheets and manual exports won't cut it. Leadership wants dashboards. Investors want metrics. Your ops team needs real-time visibility into what's happening acro…
Your Salesforce Data Warehouse Doesn't Need Five Vendors
February 3, 2026
Your Salesforce Data Warehouse Doesn't Need Five Vendors
Your CEO asks "What's our pipeline velocity by region?" and the honest answer is: you can't pull that from Salesforce. Not without custom report types, formula field workarounds, and a prayer that …
Databricks vs Snowflake: Which Data Platform Should You Actually Use?
February 2, 2026
Databricks vs Snowflake: Which Data Platform Should You Actually Use?
If you're evaluating data platforms, you've probably seen Databricks and Snowflake come up over and over again. They're two of the biggest names in data, but here's the thing: they're a lot more si…
The All-in-One Data Platform Buyer's Guide for Startups in 2026
February 1, 2026
The All-in-One Data Platform Buyer's Guide for Startups in 2026
Choosing an All-in-One Data Platform Shouldn’t Mean Building One Most “all-in-one” analytics tools only cover a slice of the problem. The marketing looks clean, the diagrams look promising, but on…
Stripe Sigma: Good Enough, or Time for an Alternative?
January 30, 2026
Stripe Sigma: Good Enough, or Time for an Alternative?
Stripe Sigma is Stripe's SQL-powered analytics tool built directly into your payment dashboard. Not a separate BI tool. Not a data warehouse. It's just queries against your Stripe payment data. Si…
How Startups Should Build Their Data Stack in 2026
January 27, 2026
How Startups Should Build Their Data Stack in 2026
At some point every founder needs answers to: What's our actual churn rate? Which marketing channel is driving revenue? Are we on track to hit our numbers this quarter? This guide walks you throug…
AI Data Analysis: Why Most Tools Fail (And What Actually Works)
January 17, 2026
AI Data Analysis: Why Most Tools Fail (And What Actually Works)
AI was supposed to democratize data analysis. Ask questions in plain English, get instant insights, no SQL required. Instead, most teams are more confused than ever. The promise was compelling: n…
I Built a Claude Code Skill to Search My Past Sessions
January 14, 2026
I Built a Claude Code Skill to Search My Past Sessions
The built-in /resume command in Claude Code only searches conversation titles. That's fine until you remember discussing something three weeks ago and need to find where. I kept running into this.…
Startup Data Strategy for Humans: Why Your Biggest Data Challenge Isn't Technical
January 7, 2026
Startup Data Strategy for Humans: Why Your Biggest Data Challenge Isn't Technical
This post is a partnership with David Cohen of Superposition Contrary to popular belief, data is not a thing you solve for. It’s a process you manage. For most startups, that process starts out i…
How to Connect Google Sheets to Definite with AI
January 6, 2026
How to Connect Google Sheets to Definite with AI
Tired of manually configuring integrations? You know the drill: copy API keys, paste sheet IDs, map columns, test connections—all before you can even start analyzing your data. It's frustrating, ti…
How to Trace Data Lineage in Definite
December 10, 2025
How to Trace Data Lineage in Definite
Ever wonder where a chart's data actually comes from? With Fi, Definite's AI agent, you can trace any visualization back to its source with a single question. Table of Contents How It Works What F…
Getting Started with Definite in Under 30 Minutes
December 8, 2025
Getting Started with Definite in Under 30 Minutes
Setting up a startup data stack used to mean buying Snowflake, Fivetran, dbt, and Tableau separately, then spending months stitching them together. Teams that try to stand up that full bundle often…
"qq" is cooked: @Fi brings Conversational Analytics in Slack
November 19, 2025
"qq" is cooked: @Fi brings Conversational Analytics in Slack
It's 4:38 on a Thursday and you're about to head out of town for a long weekend to see your favorite band live at Red Rocks. Your bags are packed. You've been checked in to your flight since yester…
The Founder's Guide to CRM Analytics in Attio
October 8, 2025
The Founder's Guide to CRM Analytics in Attio
Most founders treat their CRM like a scoreboard—a place to track who’s in the pipeline, what deals are open, and what’s closing soon. That’s fine for visibility, but visibility alone doesn’t drive …
An Intro to Agentic Analytics (and Why You'll Never Look Back)
September 8, 2025
An Intro to Agentic Analytics (and Why You'll Never Look Back)
Does analytics actually deliver ROI? For most teams, the honest answer is somewhere between “not sure” and “not really.” And if that’s the case, it might as well be no. But that's starting to cha…
Getting Reliable LLM-to-SQL Results with CubeJS and Constrained Decoding
August 27, 2025
Getting Reliable LLM-to-SQL Results with CubeJS and Constrained Decoding
TL;DR Pointing an LLM directly at raw warehouse tables generates fast but unreliable results. The fix lies in combining governance via CubeJS, syntax-aware SQL generation, execute-and-verify loop…
Definite Raises $10M to Deliver an AI-Native Data Platform in Minutes
August 21, 2025
Definite Raises $10M to Deliver an AI-Native Data Platform in Minutes
For too long, making sense of company data has been slow, expensive, and complex. Traditional data infrastructure requires six months, multiple vendors, and a team of data engineers just to stand u…
Tracking AI Agent Performance with Logfire and Ducklake
August 11, 2025
Tracking AI Agent Performance with Logfire and Ducklake
How do you track AI agent performance? Here I’ll do a deep dive into how we track our AI agent at Definite. This involves three parts: extracting AI agent logs into a data lake, modeling the log d…
Introducing Python support in Definite
August 5, 2025
Introducing Python support in Definite
We're on a mission to make Definite the world's best and most complete data platform. Of course, we already provide an AI analyst plugged into all your business data, vast visualization capabilitie…
Introducing target-ducklake: A Meltano Target For Ducklake
July 18, 2025
Introducing target-ducklake: A Meltano Target For Ducklake
At Definite, we’ve been a big fan of DuckDB and use it as a core part of our data infrastructure. When Duck Labs announced Ducklake in May, it was a no-brainer to integrate it with our data stack. …
Analyzing data in ChatGPT like your job depends on it
June 4, 2025
Analyzing data in ChatGPT like your job depends on it
You’ve got Stripe and Salesforce exports piling up in your Downloads folder and investor updates that need numbers yesterday. You know how to organize the data in a spreadsheet, but you’d rather ch…
DuckLake: This is your Data Lake on ACID
June 2, 2025
DuckLake: This is your Data Lake on ACID
How to build an easy (but not petabyte-scale) data lake with DuckLake, DuckDB's open-source Lakehouse extension Introduction In modern data architectures, we often face a dilemma: do we choose th…
Calculating MRR From Raw Stripe Data Is Tricky: Here’s How We Did It
May 1, 2025
Calculating MRR From Raw Stripe Data Is Tricky: Here’s How We Did It
A common request we see both here at Definite and from our customers is MRR reporting using Stripe data — especially for investor reporting and board updates. Yes, the Stripe UI already provides a …
Top 10 DuckDB Extensions to Tell Your Spouse About
March 14, 2025
Top 10 DuckDB Extensions to Tell Your Spouse About
Sometimes you just run out of things to talk about on a long road trip. Luckily there’s always DuckDB: a game-changing in-process database—capable of querying data from just about anywhere (local f…
Understanding smallpond and 3FS: A Clear Guide
March 2, 2025
Understanding smallpond and 3FS: A Clear Guide
I didn't have "DeepSeek releases distributed DuckDB" on my 2025 bingo card. You may have stumbled across smallpond from Twitter/X/LinkedIn hype. From that hype, you might have concluded Databricks…
Your First Data Hire: A Practical Guide
February 14, 2025
Your First Data Hire: A Practical Guide
After founding Seekwell, and then working at Thoughtspot, and now building the best data platform for startups, I’ve seen way too many startups dealing with endless Excel sheets that all told diffe…
A Duck Takes Flight
January 25, 2025
A Duck Takes Flight
Duck Takes Flight: Streaming Data in DuckDB We've been thinking a lot about latency, streaming and (near) real-time analytics lately. At Definite, we deal with a lot of data pipelines. In most cas…
5 Proven Strategies to Reduce Snowflake Costs Without Compromising Performance
November 12, 2024
5 Proven Strategies to Reduce Snowflake Costs Without Compromising Performance
Reducing your Snowflake bills is essential for organizations aiming to optimize their data infrastructure expenses. By implementing strategic measures and leveraging specialized tools, you can achi…
How Snowflake's Pricing Works: A Guide to Estimating and Optimizing Costs
November 8, 2024
How Snowflake's Pricing Works: A Guide to Estimating and Optimizing Costs
Understanding Snowflake's Pricing Model: A Comprehensive Guide for Managing Costs As more organizations leverage Snowflake for cloud data management, understanding how Snowflake pricing works is e…
Top 5 Snowflake Alternatives for Cost-Effective Data Warehousing in 2024
August 29, 2024
Top 5 Snowflake Alternatives for Cost-Effective Data Warehousing in 2024
Managing and analyzing data efficiently is essential for any modern business, but balancing performance and cost is often challenging. While Snowflake is a market leader for data warehouses, its pr…
Running Iceberg and Serverless DuckDB in AWS
August 13, 2024
Running Iceberg and Serverless DuckDB in AWS
Iceberg and DuckDB on AWS In our last post, we showed how to query Iceberg tables with DuckDB in a cloud setting using Google Cloud Compute resources. In this post we will do the same but with AWS…
Running Iceberg and Serverless DuckDB in Google Cloud
July 25, 2024
Running Iceberg and Serverless DuckDB in Google Cloud
In a previous post we provided examples on how to query Iceberg tables with DuckDB on a local machine. In this post, our goal is to replicate those same examples in a cloud environment. More specif…
Comparing Iceberg Query Engines
July 3, 2024
Comparing Iceberg Query Engines
Iceberg Query Engines Many in the data space are now aware of Iceberg and its powerful features that bring database-like functionality to files stored in the likes of S3 or GCS. But Iceberg is jus…
Why Databricks paid $1B for a 40 person startup (Tabular)
June 27, 2024
Why Databricks paid $1B for a 40 person startup (Tabular)
In case you missed it, earlier this month Databricks acquired Tabular, the company behind the open source project Iceberg, for over $1 billion. The acquisition, which was announced during Snowflake…
How We Migrated Our Data Warehouse from Snowflake to DuckDB
May 30, 2024
How We Migrated Our Data Warehouse from Snowflake to DuckDB
Everyone loves Snowflake. The ease of use when it comes to elastic scaling, data backups, and table optimizations amongst other features make Snowflake a great choice when setting up a data stack. …
Definite: The Missing Card Catalog for Your S3 Data Library
April 14, 2024
Definite: The Missing Card Catalog for Your S3 Data Library
Many companies dump data into S3 thinking, "we'll figure out how to use it later". They often never figure it out. It too complicated to query S3 data directly (e.g. Spark) and it's too expensive t…
OverkiLLM: Thousands of LLM calls using Ollama to write an H1
April 9, 2024
OverkiLLM: Thousands of LLM calls using Ollama to write an H1
The responses from LLMs (especially local / open source ones) are inconsistent—mostly mediocre but sometimes excellent. You often need to tweak and run the same prompt several times before getting …
Query any ducking thing: postgres, parquet, json, csv, and Google Sheets
April 5, 2024
Query any ducking thing: postgres, parquet, json, csv, and Google Sheets
Yeah, that's a lot of things to query. I've never needed to query all five of these sources at once, but I did need 3. I needed to join our Posthog logs (we export these to AWS as JSONL files) to o…
Is it possible to use Snowflake as a vector store?
October 17, 2023
Is it possible to use Snowflake as a vector store?
tl;dr - Yes, it's possible, but it's really slow (at least this way of doing it is). Snowflake as a vector store Here's the steps to pull this off: Add and "embeddings" column to your table in Sno…
Simple (and free) attribution tracking in 200 lines of JavaScript
September 26, 2023
Simple (and free) attribution tracking in 200 lines of JavaScript
Can you reliably see where your sign ups are coming from? Can you segment your funnel analytics based on these acquisition sources? These questions are key to understanding which growth channels y…
Announcing Definite: 10x faster analytics
February 21, 2023
Announcing Definite: 10x faster analytics
tl;dr - Definite is a better way to do analytics. It's like Figma for data with a healthy dose of magic (AI) sprinkled in. We’re opening up the product to more teams (sign up here). The Problem I…
The Best Data Analytics Tools to Work With in 2024: Top Solutions Reviewed
August 26, 2024
The Best Data Analytics Tools to Work With in 2024: Top Solutions Reviewed
The Data Analytics Landscape in 2024 In today’s data-driven world, organizations are increasingly relying on sophisticated data analytics tools to gain a competitive edge. Whether it's improving d…
The Best Fractional Data Teams for Startups, E-commerce, and More
February 21, 2025
The Best Fractional Data Teams for Startups, E-commerce, and More
As your business grows, so does the size and complexity of your data. When spreadsheets become bottlenecks rather than solutions, it's time for a change. A fractional data team can provide the stra…
December 31, 2025
The Best Looker Alternatives for Modern Analytics | Definite
If you've used Looker in the past, you're probably familiar with the term "self-service analytics." Looker coined this term to describe how it enables the "everyday analyst" business users to perfo…
How to Build a Data Visualization Tool
January 10, 2025
How to Build a Data Visualization Tool
In today's data-driven world, making sense of vast quantities of information is more important than ever. As businesses and organizations collect and generate massive datasets, the need for effecti…
How to Choose the Right Data Analysis Tool for Your Company
September 24, 2024
How to Choose the Right Data Analysis Tool for Your Company
How to Choose the Right Data Analysis Tool for Your Company Effective use of data is one of the greatest competitive advantages a business can have. With the sheer volume of data being generated d…
Databricks vs Snowflake: Choosing Your Data Powerhouse in 2024
September 6, 2024
Databricks vs Snowflake: Choosing Your Data Powerhouse in 2024
In today’s data-driven world, choosing the right data powerhouse can make or break your data strategy. Databricks and Snowflake lead the pack, but are they the only contenders? Let’s explore how th…
Definite vs Databricks: A Comprehensive Comparison
September 16, 2024
Definite vs Databricks: A Comprehensive Comparison
Product Overview: Definite vs Databricks Why Compare Definite and Databricks? In the world of cloud data platforms, Databricks has emerged as a major player, renowned for its ability to handle la…
Definite vs Snowflake: A Comprehensive Comparison of Two Data Platforms
September 19, 2024
Definite vs Snowflake: A Comprehensive Comparison of Two Data Platforms
Definite or Snowflake: Which Data Solution Fits Your Needs? In recent years, Snowflake has risen to prominence as a leading cloud data platform, praised for its ability to handle large datasets, d…
Domo Alternatives
December 30, 2025
Domo Alternatives
You're not the first person looking for a Domo alternative due to its challenging pricing structure and complexity. Domo's cost is a major concern for many businesses, with expenses often reaching…
Is DuckDB Open Source?
January 10, 2025
Is DuckDB Open Source?
DuckDB is an innovative open-source database management system that's rapidly gaining popularity among data professionals. Its unique combination of speed, simplicity, and analytical capabilities m…
DuckDB vs Trino: The Full Comparison
February 20, 2026
DuckDB vs Trino: The Full Comparison
Choosing the right data analytics platform is crucial for businesses looking to harness the power of their data. Two popular options in the market are DuckDB and Trino. But how do they compare, and…
What are ETL Tools in Data Warehousing?
January 10, 2025
What are ETL Tools in Data Warehousing?
What are ETL Tools in Data Warehousing? ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools play a vital role in data warehousing, enabling you to efficiently integrate and process data from various sources. Th…
Why Your Fivetran Bill Just Doubled (And What to Do About It)
April 15, 2025
Why Your Fivetran Bill Just Doubled (And What to Do About It)
If you use Fivetran and your bill spiked in March 2025, you're not imagining things. Fivetran changed how it calculates Monthly Active Rows (MAR) from an account-wide total to a per-connector basi…
Fivetran + dbt: The Myth of 'Open Data Infrastructure'
October 15, 2025
Fivetran + dbt: The Myth of 'Open Data Infrastructure'
Fivetran and dbt Labs just announced an all-stock merger, calling it a milestone for the future of open data infrastructure. Both companies say this isn’t about lock-in — it’s about “uniting to se…
OKR vs KPI vs Balanced Scorecard
April 9, 2025
OKR vs KPI vs Balanced Scorecard
Effective performance management is critical for organizations aiming to drive strategic success, improve accountability, and measure progress. Three widely used frameworks—Objectives and Key Resu…
Open-Source Alternatives to Snowflake
March 11, 2025
Open-Source Alternatives to Snowflake
Snowflake has made waves with its cloud-based data warehousing. However, not everyone finds it to be the perfect fit. Challenges like limited optimization options can frustrate users who need more …
Power BI vs Tableau
March 1, 2026
Power BI vs Tableau
Trying to decide between Power BI and Tableau for your analytics needs? Both platforms offer powerful data visualization and business intelligence capabilities. But which one is the right fit for y…
Redshift vs Snowflake vs Definite
February 18, 2026
Redshift vs Snowflake vs Definite
In 2024, choosing the right data warehouse is more critical than ever. With data volumes exploding and businesses demanding real-time insights, you need a platform that can keep pace. Amazon Redsh…
Your AI Analyst Is Only as Good as Your Metric Definitions
February 6, 2026
Your AI Analyst Is Only as Good as Your Metric Definitions
Three people on your team calculate revenue. One includes refunds. One excludes trial accounts. One counts recognized revenue on a cash basis. All three are "right" according to their own logic. Al…
What is a Semantic Layer in Data Warehousing?
January 10, 2025
What is a Semantic Layer in Data Warehousing?
In the world of data warehousing, making sense of complex data structures can be a daunting task, especially for non-technical users. This is where a semantic layer comes into play. A semantic la…
Top AI Text-to-SQL Tools
January 31, 2025
Top AI Text-to-SQL Tools
Extracting insights from data is essential for making informed business decisions. However, writing complex SQL queries to analyze data can be time-consuming and require technical expertise. That'…
Types of Dimensions in Data Warehouse
January 31, 2025
Types of Dimensions in Data Warehouse
When you're building a data warehouse, dimensions are key components that help you make sense of your business data. They provide the context and attributes needed to analyze and understand the fac…
What Is a Data Lakehouse?
April 1, 2025
What Is a Data Lakehouse?
A data lakehouse is a unified data management architecture that combines the flexibility and cost-efficiency of data lakes with the performance and governance capabilities of data warehouses. This…
What is Data Querying?
January 31, 2025
What is Data Querying?
Data querying is a fundamental concept in database management that enables you to interact with and extract information from your databases. It forms the backbone of data-driven decision making, al…

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