Data

Transforming Data with Amazon Athena

My prior posts used Lambda to do data transformation. But what if we could use a non-programmatic tool, in keeping with the Extract-Load-Transform mindset of the modern data pipeline. As it turns, we can: Amazon Athena can write data as well as query it. There are, of course, a few stumbles along the way. In this blog post I walk through the process of aggregating CloudTrail data using SQL.

Aggregating Files in your Data Lake – Part 2

When I ran the Lambda from my previous post against Chariot’s CloudTrail repository, it took almost four minutes to process a single day’s worth of data. That seems like a long time, and as a developer I want to optimize everything I write. In this post I look into analyzing the current runtime, and options for improving it.

Aggregating Files in your Data Lake – Part 1

As I’ve written in the past, large numbers of small files make for an inefficient data lake. But sometimes, you can’t avoid small files. Our CloudTrail repository, for example, has 4,601,675 files as-of this morning, 44% of which are under 1,000 bytes long. In this post, I develop a Lambda-based data pipeline to aggregate these files, storing them in a new S3 location partitioned by date. Along the way I call out some of the challenges that face such a pipeline.

Unbalanced Data in Redshift

Decision support databases have a number of quirks that are not obvious to the casual user, particularly someone coming from an OLTP background. In this post I look at how unbalanced distributions can impact your query performance, how you can identify imbalances, and what you can do to fix them.

Twenty Years of Big Data

More, cheaper, faster: our own Keith Gregory recounts the changes in big data, data storage, and data engineering over the last two decades.

Rightsizing Data for Athena

Amazon Athena is a service that lets you run SQL queries against structured data files stored in S3. It takes a “divide and conquer” approach, spinning up parallel query execution engines that each examine only a portion of your data. The performance of these queries, however, depends on how you consolidate and partition your data. In this post I compare query times for a moderately large dataset, looking for the “sweet spot” between number of files and individual file size.

Hunting the Wolf: App UX and Database Review

The Wolf Golf Scorecard app for Android, by Rod Biresch of Chariot Solutions, is a record-keeping application for a classic four-player golf game. Recently, Chariot had the opportunity to redesign and refresh the look-and-feel and usability of the application (first released in 2016) through a complete design deep-dive process.

Introducing Team Data

This post is a quick primer on the basic titles and skills best suited to fulfill responsibilities along your company’s data pipeline.