The first decision

Define your analytics upfront.

Everyone can say they want "analytics" for their org, but analytics is a broad category that requires narrowing it down.

It could be descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, or prescriptive analytics.

Why narrow it down?

Because everything about your data platform design depends on it.

• Storage (file type, columnar vs row compression, partitioning, and distribution, relational DB vs data warehouse vs data lake)

• Compute (SQL engine, multi-language compute, single-threaded or parallel)

• Modeling (dimensional, relational, grain of the data, feature engineering, etc)

• Latency (daily/weekly/monthly batch, streaming or near real-time latency)

Defining core elements up front makes dozens of later decisions easier.

A great data team knows how to ask these questions.

A great business team knows how important defining their data goals is.

I’m here,

Sawyer