Informed Company: How to Build Modern Agile Data Stacks that Drive Winning Insights

"In their work at Chartio, Fowler and David get to meet many people who work with data every day. One of their favorite questions to ask them is, "Where did you learn everything you know about data?" Surprisingly, most people tell them they're completelyself-taught and have "just figured it out". As a follow-up, they ask what sources they've relied on, and the answers are all over the map. Mostly they'll cite Google, StackOverflow, blogs, and sometimes these books: Agile Data Warehouse Design by Lawrence Corr (2011) or The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Ralph Kimball (originally published in 2004 with a 3rd edition update in 2013). These books were very good for their time, and became classics. But in the timeframe of data, they're ancient. Both were writtenbefore Redshift and the gains of the cloud C-Store warehouse. Back then, data was at a totally different scale, had very different costs, was used with totally different products, and was handled by people with very different training--primarily just at enterprise companies. It has gotten to the point where pointing people to these books can do more harm than good. Over the years,Fowler and David have had the incredible opportunity to work with many data teams, architectures, tools, and platforms, and they've built up a body of knowledge around what works--and what doesn't--when it comes to data. They've been sharing this knowledge with customers, and waiting for someone to publish a book on these maturing modern data best practices.They got a bit impatient and earlier this year,theye gathered their notes and combined knowledge and started writing the definitive new data book themselves"--
Learn how to manage a modern data stack and get the most out of data in your organization! Thanks to the emergence of new technologies and the explosion of data in recent years, we need new practices for managing and getting value out of data. In the modern, data driven competitive landscape the "best guess" approach—reading blog posts here and there and patching together data practices without any real visibility—is no longer going to hack it. The Informed Company provides definitive direction on how best to leverage the modern data stack, including cloud computing, columnar storage, cloud ETL tools, and cloud BI tools. You'll learn how to work with Agile methods and set up processes that's right for your company to use your data as a key weapon for your success . . . You'll discover best practices for every stage, from querying production databases at a small startup all the way to setting up data marts for different business lines of an enterprise. In their work at Chartio, authors Fowler and David have learned that most businesspeople are almost completely self-taught when it comes to data. If they are using resources, those resources are outdated, so they're missing out on the latest cloud technologies and advances in data analytics. This book will firm up your understanding of data and bring you into the present with knowledge around what works and what doesn't. Discover the data stack strategies that are working for today's successful small, medium, and enterprise companies Learn the different Agile stages of data organization, and the right one for your team Learn how to maintain Data Lakes and Data Warehouses for effective, accessible data storage Gain the knowledge you need to architect Data Warehouses and Data Marts Understand your business's level of data sophistication and the steps you can take to get to "level up" your data The Informed Company is the definitive data book for anyone who wants to work faster and more nimbly, armed with actionable decision-making data.