Data First Consultancy @DataFirstGroup

Snowflake’s latest piece pits LAF against Databricks Delta Sharing + Deep Clones, claiming 50% lower cost and much less plumbing. Sensible assumptions, but based on Large WH pricing and a not-yet-GA Iceberg path. Worth running your own TCO. #DataOps #CloudData…

Quick refresher for anyone prepping data interviews: joins, window functions, aggregation logic and NULL quirks still trip up plenty of us. Nate Rosidi outlines six pitfalls with clear fixes - worth a read before your next panel. #SQL #DataCareers kdnuggets.com/most-candidate…

Databricks outlines AI-powered journeys: vector search and personalised recs on a lakehouse to lift sales. Sensible, but it assumes pristine 1st-party data and solid MLOps - not a quick win for every retailer. Build vs buy is still open. #ecommerce #AI databricks.com/blog/search-sa…

Snowflake’s fresh blog unwraps the Gen AI specialty cert, opening with Cortex Search. Good tips on chunking, TARGET_LAG and credit watching, but bear in mind it all stays in the Snowflake garden. #Snowflake #GenAI medium.com/snowflake/%EF%…

Muhammad Ardi walks through MobileNetV1 from scratch in PyTorch. Good refresher on how depthwise separable convs cut >80% compute, and why width / res multipliers often beat stacking layers. Handy for edge deployments. #DeepLearning #PyTorch towardsdatascience.com/the-tiny-giant…

Useful rundown from Erika G. Gonçalves on why GenAI apps need the same discipline as traditional software. Continuous eval loops, clear acceptance criteria, and auditable pipelines aren’t optional if you want anything beyond a flashy demo. #MLOps #GenAI towardsdatascience.com/ai-operations-…

OpenAI spotlights Blue J, a GPT-4.1 tool for tax research. Cited answers are handy, but AI reasoning still hides behind a black box - regulators and CFOs will ask how conclusions were drawn. A useful aid, yet not a rubber stamp. #AI #taxtech openai.com/index/blue-j

Capitaine's walkthrough of zero inflation is a handy reminder that not every tsunami of zeros is data entry noise. He sets out a neat decision flow: check dispersion, run Vuong tests, then pick your poison - hurdle, ZIP or ZINB. I like the emphasis on interpreting the two…

Caught Rudderstack dissecting the 'real-time' rung of data maturity. Their pitch: millisecond events let you personalise, trigger journeys, and shift spend from batch reporting to instant action. Fair, yet two gaps: the culture shock when dashboards vanish, and the cost of…

Databricks’ latest piece on architecting high-concurrency, low-latency warehouses leans on Photon, Delta caching and serverless SQL. Practical tuning tips, but light on cost optics and lock-in angles. Worth a skim if you’re capacity planning. #DataOps #Databricks…

Garcia Aramouni tests GPT-4, Gemini and a lean custom solver on a logic puzzle. The bespoke model wins on speed and consistency, a reminder that not every task needs an LLM hammer - sometimes a plain screwdriver is faster and cheaper. #AI #ML towardsdatascience.com/should-we-use-…

Snowflake’s newest walk-through shows how to run a Tailscale sidecar in Snowpark Container Services, using an External Access Integration and an ephemeral auth key. Useful when external machines must reach an SPCS endpoint or your container needs a resource on the Tailscale LAN…

Jacopo makes a solid case for function-first pipelines: platform handles infra, engineers write logic. Much saner than wrestling giant DAGs. Still, 10-100GB vertical scale leaves a gap once datasets really explode. #DataEngineering #Bauplan dataengineeringweekly.com/p/insights-fro…

Rudderstack's new piece touts the 'real-time' tier of data maturity for personalisation and targeting. Chase speed by all means, but if your models are flaky you'll just deliver wrong content faster. Sort quality and governance first. #DataMaturity #MarTech…

Databricks puts Kythera Labs front and centre, arguing Delta Sharing trims more than $2m a year by ditching silo-to-silo extracts. Impressive headline, yet the blog skirts key details: how savings were audited, and what checks keep protected health info safe once it leaves the…

OpenAI quietly dropped fresh notes on GPT Realtime this week, pitching a swipe-to-speak model and API tweaks (MCP servers, image input, SIP calls). A neat step if you’re building multimodal or telephony apps, but read between the lines: we still have no hard numbers on latency,…

Snowflake's new post shows how to run Tailscale in Snowpark Container Services via a userspace sidecar. Handy when you need mesh access without Snowflake creds, but the demo opens 0.0.0.0:443 to the world - lock it down in prod. #CloudSecurity #DataOps medium.com/snowflake/conn…

Good shout from KDnuggets: dataclass isn’t just syntactic sugar - it steers you towards cleaner, type-safer design and scraps boilerplate. Still hand-crafting __init__ and repr? Time for a rethink. #Python #DevTips #CleanCode kdnuggets.com/how-to-use-pyt…

Refreshing to see ACID unpacked from a data engineer’s rather than a DBA’s angle. Vu Trinh shows why object storage handles durability for you, but isolation is where OLAP tools still trip up - understanding anomalies beats blind trust in 'supports ACID'. #DataEngineering #OLAP…

Bronze and Silver clean data, Gold curates it. But ops agility needs a Platinum tier - low latency features piped straight into apps and ML. If your exec dashboard doubles as fraud detector you are mixing layers. #dataengineering #analytics dataengineeringweekly.com/p/revisiting-m…