Data First Consultancy @DataFirstGroup

Refreshingly pragmatic breakdown from Vu Trinh on why your OLTP DB grinds to a halt when analysts start firing aggregation queries. Key takeaway: storage layout is workload design. Row-stores love fast, transactional writes; column-stores (or hybrids) shine when you only need two…

Spotted a practical deep dive into shipping ML models with Django - from notebook to web form and REST endpoint in one sitting. Great for anyone who wants a single codebase that trains, serves and exposes an API without the overhead of extra microservices. Handy touches on async…

Turns out most AI requests aren't about bigger models, they're about clarity: explain the why, hit the KPIs, ship something maintainable. Bernardo's piece neatly reminds us that project success hinges more on process and comms than fancy maths. #AI #ProductDelivery…

Stumbled across Databricks’s latest Brickster Voices profile on Cindy Nicola, their VP of Global TA. It’s mostly an employer-brand piece, yet there are useful nuggets: Cindy emphasises pipelining skills ahead of demand, using data to curb bias, and treating hiring managers as…

Airbyte's new post claims 4-10x faster syncs by batching records, trimming JSON parsing, and offloading jobs from the JVM. Love the engineering detail, but the benchmarks run on clean pipes - keen to see numbers on noisy SaaS APIs. #dataintegration #etl airbyte.com/blog/speed-imp…

Daniel flips the usual 'DuckDB or Polars?' debate: run them together. DuckDB brings SQL power, Polars delivers rapid dataframe ops, Arrow makes the hand-off cheap. Smart combo for local crunching before Spark-size bills kick in. #DataEngineering #Analytics…

Snowflake’s AppFolio case study claims a quick win: switch to Gen2 warehouses and MERGE jobs drop from 55 to 40 mins, no bigger clusters. Useful, yet 27% isn’t seismic and cost details are absent. Worth a look, but keep questions handy. #DataOps #Snowflake…

Felipe Adachi keeps LLM eval grounded: start with the user task, tie it to clear metrics, automate checks, and bring humans back when things drift. A solid recipe for prod models. #LLMs #MLOps towardsdatascience.com/notes-on-llm-e…

Databricks update: SQL Server connector now GA. Good for shops straddling on-prem and lakehouse, but I'd love benchmarks against plain Spark JDBC and clarity on network/licensing hurdles. Anyone tested it? #DataEngineering #ETL databricks.com/blog/announcin…

Digging into Eivind Kjosbakken’s walkthrough on scaling vision language models, what struck me is how he treats OCR, embedding and retrieval as one continuous production loop rather than three isolated PoCs. The takeaway: if you need millions of PDFs parsed, prioritise dataset…

Practical read from Lucas See: turns a videogame recommender into a live FastAPI service on Render, covering Dockerfiles, env vars and automated deploys. Good reminder that model accuracy is pointless if you can't ship. #FastAPI #MLOps towardsdatascience.com/building-a-vid…

Snowflake’s new post gets into the nuts-and-bolts of securing Data Clean Rooms: mapping UI personas to custom roles, leaning on QUERY_TAG for audits and nudging everyone onto Snowflake auth by Sept 2025. A practical read if you live in ACCOUNT_USAGE, but note the gaps - API calls…

AI chatter swings between 'game-changing miracle' and 'existential threat'. TDS Editors points to the cure: lift the bonnet and inspect datasets, metrics and failure modes. Hard to mythologise a system once you've debugged one. #AI #ML towardsdatascience.com/tds-newsletter…

Airbyte has rolled out Enterprise Flex, pitching it as the answer for firms that want full control over where and how their pipelines run. The article highlights flexible deployment, private SaaS, fine grained RBAC and SOC2, yet skims over potential downsides: licence uplift,…

Daniel ditches the 'vs' framing: DuckDB and Polars tackle different layers. DuckDB for SQL horsepower, Polars for DataFrame ergonomics - together they make exploration as slick as prod ETL. Worth trying mixed workloads. #DataEngineering #Analytics confessionsofadataguy.com/duckdb-vs-pola…

Just finished Vu Trinh’s deep-dive into Meta’s Scribe pipeline: a masterclass in keeping terabytes-per-second flowing without melting disks or links. My takeaways: • Split brain storage – metadata in LogDevice, payload in Tectonic – lets each layer optimise for its own IO •…

Just finished Vu Trinh’s deep-dive into Meta’s “Scribe” pipeline and it’s a timely reminder that shifting petabytes is 90% sweat, 10% glamour. Sharp move keeping metadata in LogDevice and bulk payloads in Tectonic - keeps the hot path lean while the cold path goes cheap. I like…

Databricks unwraps 'Governed Tags' for Unity Catalog - public preview to standardise metadata across data and ML assets. Useful for discoverability and policy, but value depends on shared semantics and tag upkeep. #DataGovernance #Databricks databricks.com/blog/enforce-c…

Airbyte walks through wiring LLM agents into data workflows. Practical notes on prompt chaining, memory and orchestration, yet most examples hinge on their connectors so independence stays limited. Worth a scan, just mind the lock in risk. #AI #DataOps airbyte.com/blog/ai-agents…

Databricks’ post on Lakeflow Connect’s new SQL Server connector is big on GA fanfare. Handy for teams bridging on-prem SQL and the lakehouse, but mind the fine print: performance depends on your CDC setup and partitioning. #DataIntegration #SQL databricks.com/blog/announcin…