Narrator Data Blog | Narrator.ai

Joining the Data Revolution: Founder to Data Evangelist

I never thought I’d be knee-deep in the data space, but here I am, leading the charge as the Head of Growth at a data startup. How did I get here? Well, I fell in love... Truth is I’m not a numbers person but as a former founder,

Data Engineering

Does Incremental Modeling Truly Save Money? Avoiding Pitfalls for Data Engineers

Discover effective cost-saving strategies for data engineers to optimize incremental data processing. Learn how to overcome challenges and maximize the benefits of this powerful approach.

Rethink Your Metrics and Drive Meaningful Change

While big-picture metrics like total sales and annual recurring revenue (ARR) give you an overview, they don't provide the practical insights needed for real change.

New Activity Schema Course by DeepSkyData

Discover a new course from DeepSkyData that empowers product managers, data analysts, and analytics engineers to master the Activity Schema.

Data Analysis

The Data Modeling Paradox: Are we sacrificing insights for structure?

While companies heavily rely on data to inform their strategies, the very data models they employ often hinder their ability to ask deep and insightful questions.

Data Engineering

Leaving Data Chaos Behind: A Paradigm Shift towards Activity-based Modeling

Explore a powerful approach that can revolutionize the way you understand and utilize data: modeling data as activities. Activities can bring clarity and organization to your data, allowing you to gain valuable insights and make the most of your data.

Data Analysis

How to keep your data clean with proper alerting from your data system

No data is perfect, and data quality practices and processes are absolutely critical to put in place before any analysis can be performed.

Data Engineering

How to calculate data warehouse cost and prevent it from exploding

A realistic way to estimate warehouse cost and techniques to prevent the warehouse cost from getting out of hand.

Data Engineering

The cost of product analytics data in your data warehouse

Syncing product analytics data into your warehouse is more expensive than you might think. This explains why, and what to do about it.

Data Analysis

What's missing from the Amplitude and Snowflake partnership

Amplitude and Snowflake's partnership is a great first pass at warehouse-powered data analytics. However, this sync is missing many data team requirements for a complex and secure production data system.

Data Analysis

Bad data analysis questions I see every week (and how to fix them)

For the past few years at Narrator, I’ve been collecting the bad data questions I often stumble upon and reflecting on how to make them better. This simple exercise, done regularly for a few years, significantly improved the quality of questions I ask. Last week, I thought other data

Forget about the product

Last week at Narrator, we did an interesting product thinking exercise that reminded me of the incredible value of constantly going back to the customer and reasoning from there, so I thought I’d share what it was and why it ended up being so valuable for us. Here’s

Data Analysis

How I frame data questions to make analyses more useful

A simple yet effective mental model I use to turn a vague stakeholder request into something that can be analyzed with data.

A collage of all blog authors mentioned in the post

Data Science

Comprehensive, original, insightful, and otherwise interesting data science blogs

Most blogs in data science are like most people at a cocktail party: they talk news, weather, or politics, and do not venture into deep, interesting subjects. I provide a list of blogs that do.

Why star schema is set up for failure

What is star schema? Star schema [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_schema] is the most common approach to data modeling — primarily made up of fact and dimension tables. Why you need data modeling * Your company has a lot of data across many different data sources: website and marketing interactions,

Data Engineering

Handling slowly changing dimensions in an Activity Schema

The simplicity of modeling slowly changing dimensions in an Activity Schema vs a Star Schema

Data Engineering

Identifying bot traffic with SQL

Systematically identify bot users in your web traffic with a simple SQL query.

Data Analysis

A guide to data-driven prioritization for product managers

PMs use data to prioritize, align their team, and communicate the impact of their work. How does this work in practice?

Unlocking the Value of Data Governance

How deploying data governance can bring meaning to your data and accelerate your digital transformation.

Data Analysis

What (actually) is self service analytics?

Why data-informed decisions are more important than broad access to data for self service analytics

Data Science

When Correlation is Better than Causation

A heuristic approach for using correlations to inform decisions

Data Analysis

Self Service Analytics

Will business users ever be able to ask ad hoc questions without involving data teams? Narrator’s self-service analytics solution is the answer.

Sources and Destinations: Data Engineering

In a recent podcast of Sources and Destinations, our CEO Ahmed talks about data engineering, industry confusions and what is it really like to be a data-driven company.

SQL

PostgreSQL's missing DateDiff function

DATEDIFF is an extremely useful function for analytical queries. Given two timestamps it'll tell you how many days, weeks, months, hours, etc they are apart. Here we show an implementation of this function for Postgres.

Marketing

Identity Resolution in a privacy-first, cookie-less future: How to prepare tracking for analytics

Learn how we’ve been able to get 95% identity attribution to devices and modern browsers in a world of cookie consent banners and privacy-first updates.