Market analysis and economics of data infrastructure
Part 2 of The Economics of Data Architectures in 2026 Part 1 surveyed seven architecture patterns, each with its own economics. Warehouse bets on centralization. Lakehouse bets on eliminating the ETL tax. Mesh bets on distributed ownership. And so on. But here’s the question nobody asks at selection time: what will it cost to leave? […]
Data Architectures and Change Management Read More »
Part 1 of The Economics of Data Architectures in 2026 The Modern Data Stack is Dead The Modern Data Stack (MDS) was never an architecture. It was a philosophy: best-of-breed tools, loosely coupled via APIs, separation of concerns. Fivetran for ingestion. Snowflake for storage. dbt for transformation. Looker for visualization. Buy the pieces, assemble yourself.
Data Architectures and Their Economics Read More »
This is the third in my series analyzing data-centric markets. See also: Demystifying the Database Market in 2025 and Demystifying the Data Governance Market in 2025. It’s interesting how major vendors position themselves now, none of them lead with “analytics”. Databricks calls itself “the Data and AI company.” Snowflake is “the AI Data Cloud.” dbt
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The Economics of Data Gravity In 2010, Dave McCrory introduced the concept of “data gravity” to describe a phenomenon IT professionals were increasingly experiencing: as data accumulates in one location, it becomes harder to move, and the systems that depend on it tend to cluster nearby. The metaphor suggested that data, like physical mass, exerts
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This is the second in my series analyzing data centirc markets. Read part one: Demystifying the Database Market in 2025. According to Gartner (2024), by 2027, 80% of data and analytics governance initiatives will fail due to a lack of a real or manufactured crisis. This is a pretty loaded statement, because it tells us
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The Database Management System Market in Plain Language Your job, unfortunately, depends on a database doing what it’s supposed to: record the firm’s relationship to money in a structured format. If that database went away the world would absolutely collapse. I wish I was kidding, but think about it: if your corporate ERP system goes
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