Cedric Chin
Staff writer at Holistics. Enjoys Python, coffee, green tea, and cats. I'd love to talk to you about the future of business intelligence!
Business Intelligence A Quick Way To Get On Top Of Your Company’s Data: Create a Spreadsheet-Based Data Dictionary!
A data dictionary is a document that assists you in navigating your team's mountain of data. We show you how to create a spreadsheet-based data dictionary with Excel and dbdiagram.io.
Data Modeling The Three Types of Fact Tables
A concise tour of one of the basic components of Kimball dimensional data modeling. We explore the three types of fact tables, and then analyze why they have lasted the test of time.
Business Intelligence Death to Dashboards, Really?
Are dashboards really 'dead'? A response to a vendor trend that seems rather premature.
Business Intelligence The Emotional Needs of Dashboarding
Treating your dashboards like a product means thinking about ALL of your user's needs — rational or otherwise.
Business Intelligence Data Careers: Dealing With Being in a Cost Center
Building a career in data often means building a career in a business cost center. This isn't necessarily bad. Here's how to think about it.
Business Intelligence What is an OLAP Cube? An Exhaustive Explainer
The definitive explainer for OLAP cubes, where we cover every single possible definition for the phrase.
Data Modeling A 2020 Reader's Guide to The Data Warehouse Toolkit
Ralph Kimball's classic book The Data Warehouse Toolkit introduce the world to the practice of data modeling. Here's how to read it in 2022.
Business Intelligence Read Data Research Papers
A hack for when you don't understand data jargon.
Business Intelligence The Six Ways People Deflect Inconvenient Data
We take a look at an exhaustive list of reasons people give when they want to ignore anomalous data.
Business Fundamentals The Intuition Behind The Rule of 40
The origins and intuition behind a famous SaaS business metric.
Business Intelligence Obsess Over Controllable Input Metrics
Why Amazon's notion of measuring controllable input metrics is a lot more profound than you might think.
Business Intelligence This is How Amazon Measures Itself
How Amazon uses metrics. A summary of chapter 6 of Working Backwards, the first book to explain how Amazon really works.
Business Intelligence So You Want To Find an Analytics Engineering Job?
Looking for an analytics engineering job in your locale? Read this.
Business Intelligence What We Know and Don't Know About Analytics Engineering
Everything we know and don't yet know about the emerging role of analytics engineering.
Business Intelligence Three Data Industry Questions We're Investigating For The New Year
Three changes in the data landscape we're investigating over the next few months.
Business Intelligence Five Things We're Pretty Sure About
Five quick things we know to be true, written for the end of the year.
Business Intelligence Embrace The Data Schlep First
Every cool data project has some schlep up front. Here's why it's a good idea to keep that in mind.
Data Modeling Applying The Principles of Agile to Data Modeling
In our third and final part on Agile Data Warehouse, we take a look at the origins of the Agile Manifesto, from which Corr and Stagnitto took inspiration.
Business Intelligence A Business Process Worth Measuring
The second part of our series on Agile Data Warehouse Design, a 2011 attempt at applying the principles of agile to the practice of data modeling.
Data Modeling First Impressions from Agile Data Warehouse Design
Agile Data Warehouse Design is a 2011 attempt at applying the principles of agile to the practice of data modeling. This is the first post in a series on the ideas from the book.
Business Intelligence The Four Flavors of Goodhart's Law
Goodhart's law says that 'when a measure becomes a target, it fails to become a good measure. Here are four ways that occurs.
Business Intelligence A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival
A short story about SQL's better rival: Michael Stonebraker's storied query language, QUEL.
Business Intelligence Top 5 Data Books To Read in 2020
Stuck at home during the pandemic? We give you Holistics's top five data books to read in 2020.
Business Intelligence Why is Data Analytics So Far Behind Software Engineering?
Why does data analytics and business intelligence lag behind the best practices and tooling of software? Two anecdotes and a theory.
Business Intelligence Business Intelligence Lessons from Softwar: A Portrait of Larry Ellison And Oracle
What we can learn from Softwar, a book about Larry Ellison's attempt to take over the enterprise software world.
Business Intelligence Redshift, Snowflake, and the Two Philosophies of Cost
What intermix.io's forced acquisition tells us about the two philosophies of cost in data analytics.
Business Intelligence A Dive Into Metadata Hubs
A look into metadata hubs, which might just be the hottest category of data tools of the past two years.
Business Intelligence Measuring a Company When a Company Is Mature
We take a look at the business fundamentals of the operations stage — the last of three stages in a company's life.
Business Intelligence Understanding the Scale Stage
The scale stage is the second of three stages in a startup's life. In this post, we discuss what product-market fit means, and then we look at healthy growth (the kind that leads to winning) and unhealthy growth (the kind that leads to company death).
Business Intelligence Measurement Before Product Market Fit
A startup's first job is to create a customer. We take a closer look at how that affects the metrics you measure at the product stage of a startup's lifecycle.
Business Intelligence How Metrics Change When Your Company Grows
When your company grows, the metrics that matter changes along with it. Here's a look at the three growth stages of every company, along with the metrics that matter most at each stage.
Business Intelligence The Magic Money Machine Model
One way to get better at business communication is to learn the fundamentals of business. We explain Return on Invested Capital from first principles, written with the data analyst in mind.
Business Intelligence Clearer Communication: How To Use The Ladder of Inference When Communicating Data To Your Business Users
If you work in data analytics, communicating complex information is just part of your job. Here's how to use the Ladder of Inference to get better at it.
Business Intelligence Data Quality from First Principles
Why data quality is an ongoing, people, process, and tools problem, and how to think about getting better at it.
Data Modeling Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCDs) In The Age of The Cloud Data Warehouse
What a new approach to slowly changing dimensions tell us about the future of dimensional data modeling.
Business Intelligence When Doing Digital Transformation, Think Capabilities, Not Maturity
Why maturity models can be a bad idea, and why using a capability model is a better idea for digital transformation.
Business Intelligence How to Measure Software Development, from ‘Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps’
Tracking the performance of your software development team is really, really difficult. The 2018 book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps gives us a fantastic way to measure just that. Here's how.
Business Intelligence Why Measuring Cash Flow is More Important Than Measuring Profitability
Why your CEO is so obsessed with cash flow metrics, and what you can do to help as an analytics person in your company.
Business Intelligence The Two Philosophies of Cost in Data Analytics
There appears to be two philosophies today when it comes to managing costs in a modern data stack. We explore what they are.
Business Intelligence Developing an Intuitive Understanding of the SaaS Quick Ratio
An explanation of the SaaS Quick Ratio that focuses on the intuition behind the metric. Written with the data analyst in mind.
Business Intelligence OLAP != OLAP Cube
There's a tendency for people to conflate OLAP with OLAP cube. We take a quick look at how this happens, why it shouldn't, and why it matters if you're a data practitioner.
Business Intelligence The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube
A definitive history of the rise of the OLAP cube, how it's affected our industry, and what comes after.
Using Holistics How to Create Data Models from External Data Sources in Holistics
In Holistics, you are now able to create data models on top of external data sources like MongoDB and Google Sheets. Here's a video tutorial on how to do exactly that.
Business Intelligence Judge Your Company: Using The Three Levels of Data Analysis For Data Career Decision-Making
Data team careers are different from equivalent careers in software engineering, product management, or UI design. Here's how to evaluate prospective employers as part of your data career.
Business Intelligence Hire Your Data Analysts First
In the past, setting up an analytics department meant hiring data engineers first. But in a cloud-first world, you can and should hire data analysts first. Here's why.
Using Holistics Custom SQL with Tableau? No Problems
Using custom SQL for your Tableau workbooks is usually a really bad idea. Here's how using Holistics with Tableau makes this a non-problem.
Using Holistics Effortless Materialized Views for Tableau with Holistics
Tableau may be the best data visualizer on the planet today, but Holistics makes Tableau more awesome, by making data prep trivially easy.
Business Intelligence When Should You Get a Data Warehouse?
Occasionally, we get asked “when should we consider getting a data warehouse?”. The answer is a lot simpler than you think!
Holistics — The Best Affordable Alternative to Looker
Using Holistics Holistics Data Modeling, Explained
Holistics's data modeling layer allows data teams to radically increase their productivity. No repeated queries. Self-serve reports and dashboards. Here's how it works.
Business Intelligence When Measuring Performance, Find Lines in the Sand
One of the most useful ideas from the 2013 book Lean Analytics is the notion of 'lines in the sand' — concrete values that tell you how well you're doing on a metric that matters.
Business Intelligence Lean Analytics Part 2: The Stages of a Data Driven Startup
In Part 2 of our summary of Lean Analytics, we cover the five stages of a data driven startup, and the book's tips for creating a data-driven culture in your company.
Business Intelligence Lean Analytics Part 1: An Introduction to Analytical Thinking
In the first part of our comprehensive summary of Lean Analytics, we examine the basics of analytical thinking, explore six startup business models, and examine the metrics that matter the most to each.
Business Intelligence The Two Types of Operating Indicators
In operational analytics, you're either looking at a leading indicator, or you're looking at a lagging trend indicator. Here's why this particular categorisation is so useful.
Business Intelligence Beware What You Measure: The Principle of Pairing Indicators
When you're implementing company-wide analytics, it's easy to fall into the trap of measuring only one metric. Don't. The principle of pairing indicators is why.