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6 Tips for Optimizing Databricks Cluster and Pipeline Performance and Cost

Databricks, easily the hotest tool these days for Data Lakes and Data Warehousing, it’s a beast. As with any new technology there are always growing pains, learnings, and tips and tricks that might not be obvious to those dipping their toes in the water. Not understand certain concepts, and being unware of specific configurations can […]

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Data Modeling – Relational Databases (SQL) vs Data Lake (File Based)

Data Modeling is a topic that never goes away. Sometimes I do reminisce about the good ol’ days of Kimball-style data models, it was so simple, straightforward, just the same thing for years. Then Big Data happened, Spark happened. Things just changed. There is a lot of new content coming out around Data Lakes and […]

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Review of Airbyte for Data Engineers

It’s hard to keep up with the never-ending stream of new Data Engineering tools these days. Always something new around the next bend. I find it interesting to kick the tries on the new kids on the block. It’s always interesting to see what angle or pain point a new tool tries to hone in […]

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Bitwise Operations for Data Engineers

Ugh. Cursed bitwise operations … something usually reserved for the low-level mythical engineers writing code no one should have to write. I’ve escaped all but twice during my meager existence, recently I had to use a bitwise operation while converting a Python hashing algorithm into PySpark code. It made my brain hurt. What is this […]

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gRPC for Data Engineers

If you’ve been around Data Engineering for a while, like me, you’ve noticed a few trends in the industry at wide, and in individual data engineers themselves. There seem to be a few types of data engineers, and it depends on where you’ve worked, and what your projects have looked like that put you here […]

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The Wild West of Parallel Computing – Review of Bodo.ai

It truly is the Wild West of parallel computing these days. It seems that big data has brought out an onslaught of companies trying to either take advantage of making it easier to use any number of big data platforms or making up their own. Most of them usually take shots at tools like Spark […]

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Dask vs PySpark – Performance and Other Thoughts.

Every once in awhile I see someone talking about their wonder distributed cluster of Dask machines, and my curiosity gets aroused. I know plenty of people use Dask, mostly on their local machines, but it seems like the meteoric rise of Spark, especially with tools like EMR and Databricks, that Dask is slowly slipping into […]

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Why I both Love and Hate LeetCode

There are a few things in life I both love and hate. Let’s see …. hot weather, cold weather, working for a living, and …. LeetCode. I mean it is totally fun to push yourself and try to solve hard problems, but then the other side of me is like … well I’ve been writing […]

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Databricks vs AWS EMR – Theory and Real Life.

I saw a recent post on r/datengineering, a question centered around why Databricks is so popular when tools like EMR have been floating around for so long. It got me thinking about it. It really isn’t all about the technical side and offerings, although that does play a large role. There are always proponents for […]

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“Don’t mess with the dials,” they said. Spark (PySpark) Shuffle Partition Configuration and Performance.

Sometimes I amaze myself. I’ve been using PySpark for a few years now, happily crunching hundreds of TBs of data without much problem. Sure you randomly run into OOM errors and other such nonsense. Usually inspecting the code for something silly, throwing in a persist() or cache() here and there will solve 99% of the […]

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