In 2025, too many congratulated themselves on AI progress using the wrong measures. Lines of code added. Pull requests opened. Teams saying they “feel faster.” Those are activity metrics that we long considered junk. They are easy to inflate, easy to celebrate, and largely meaningless.

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, or Alice in Chains

#philosophy #philsky #philosophysky #cogsci #academia #science

This is going to do wonders for LoC metrics!

MVP programs are elite marketing. Get customers to do your product marketing for free, reward them with status, make them reapply yearly, call it “community.” Microsoft perfected it. Snowflake and Databricks are just running the modern remix. #databs

These empirical results appear to confirm much of the argument in David Epstein's book "Range Why Generalists Triumph". Strongly recommended for parents.

Tuesday Coginiti announced a strategic partnership with Expanso focused on secure end-to-end data management. We’re enabling customers to filter and cleans data at the source, then integrate, model, and serve trusted data products.

News: We are proud to announce a new partnership between Expanso and Coginiti, which is designed to help organizations with distributed data. If you believe "there's got to be a better way to handle our global organization's data," we can confidently say THERE IS. 😄 exso.cloud/expanso-cogi...

When my family and colleagues ask why I put effort into hosting our local low-key data happy hour. That’s 713 people we helped connect this year. Hundreds or stories about individual and organizational data struggles and wins. And yeah, hundreds of product discovery discussions too.

I for one blame Palantir

All these people out here looking for an audience. I’d be happy with a nice collection of interlocutors.

Saw that Spark (Databricks) wants to put measures into SQL, which is great. I first saw a similar proposal from @julianhyde.bsky.social a few years ago.

Pretty cool, my friend Paul Hletko's FEW Spirits named to the bourbon hall of fame! I remember when he offered us free pizza to help with bottling in the little distillery just off Chicago Ave, back when micro distilling was still novel.

It was rumored a couple of months ago that Confluent was in talks to get acquired. With properties like Redhat I guess IBM makes sense as an acquirer, and there are worse acquirers out there.

Went to buy a gift from Hooké, which is based in Canada, and hit with a 50% tariff (tax). Mildly infuriating

My wife has an inner 5yo for whom there can never be too many lights on the Christmas tree.

We made a hire today that I’ve been trying to work out for the last couple years. (Timing never matched up) Excited for next week.

Do you like databases? Do you want to hear two database professors rant about them? Do you need one of those professors to have a Turing Award for databases? If yes, then join Mike Stonebraker and I next Wed Dec 10 @ 1:00pm EST for database hot takes: www.dbos.dev/webcast-2025...

Calling it a “knowledge graph” was a mistake and it grinds the gears of the epistemologist in me. Knowledge is factive. These systems store claims, not truth. We should’ve called them something weaker like information graphs.

Simple OLAP cache based on DuckDB, adding instant speed up for your DuckDB queries. This is a deep dive into OLAP and Caches, a never-ending (love/hate) story 😃.

The new Gartner report on metadata management just came out, and it’s interesting as much for who made the list as for who didn’t. Coalesce and ServiceNow made the list on the basis of recent acquisitions. Maybe next year we see Atlassian following today's Secoda acquisition.

‘25 replay looks a lot like ‘24. Discovered Maggie Antone and hope she puts out some new music in ‘26.

Coginiti 25.11 is now in the wild! This is our last release of the year and I'm really proud of all the work the team put in getting this out. We finally went and made Oracle a first-class citizen in Coginiti. It's 2025 and time to move on from your amphibian-based development environments.

Note to self, don’t defrost a turkey in a YETI cooler because it will stay frozen for a solid week.

Some thoughts on the latest from Open Semantic Interchange

Setting aside Hegseth’s perverse relationship with “masculinity” he clearly has no understanding of Scouting or its values. Scouting has has coed programs for over a quarter century and it’s only made the program stronger the more they’ve leaned into it.

Lot of fun and learning at our Apache Iceberg meetup last night. Deep dive on MinIO new AIStor, Iceberg native object storage similar to Amazon's S3Tables. @sandonjacobs.bsky.social did a stellar presentation on the Streamhouse! Closed with a speed run of Coginiti's adaptive query capabilities.

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Benjamin Wagner🇩🇪 will present @firebolthq.bsky.social's native support for low-latency queries on Apache Iceberg tables. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Home from the conference, time to start the great vendor sequence unsubscribe.

Sad day as Todd Snider, the last of the great pot smoking barefoot hippie folk singers, has passed. I probably saw Snider at least a dozen times and my kids grew up with him in the background. We're all the poorer now.

North Carolina Apache Iceberg meetup is back next week with talks from Minio, CelerData, and Confluent. Come learn about the latest in open table formats and the open lake house. #databs

ADBC drivers in #Java? Yes. The latest release of ADBC adds a JNI layer that lets Java apps load drivers, run queries, and fetch results fast in @arrow.apache.org format. Read the new blog post from @ian.columnar.tech and David Li for examples and perf comparisons vs. JDBC. Link in comments👇

Happy release day, Drive-By Truckers dropped two and half hours of remix/remastered tracks along with a bunch of live performances. This is the only DBT I need in my life 😂

Today I learned that Rome has an entire store dedicated to @duckdb.org merchandising!

We were touring the Roman Forum today when we thought we heard a small explosion followed soon by a rush of sirens. We saw the fire crews and police later after leaving the Colosseum. Glad to learn there were no fatalities.

The 2025 MAD Landscape is out from Matt Turck. After ten years of explosive growth in the landscape, the team decided to narrow the products and companies represented by almost half. Now the most remarkable thing about the landscape is the curious choice over what's been included or excluded.

We love Apache Arrow, but when I learned about Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC) I wanted it available for every data platform like yesterday. So I'm super excited for the launch of Columnar! #databs

Looking forward to being at the GovAI Summit (Oct 27-29, Arlington VA) on behalf of Coginiti! If you’ll be around, stop by our booth and let’s connect in person. And if you’re not at the conference but you'd like to grab a coffee (or whiskey🥃) while I’m in town, send me a message and lets meet up.

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Ian Cook (@ian.columnar.tech) will present @columnar.tech's work on Apache Arrow's database connectivity API (ADBC). ADBC is available in modern DBMSs. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Excited for the return of soup season

I didn't expect my first post on substack to be about competitors, but then the dbt labs/fivetran merger got announced. So here's a point of view from someone who doesn't use either, but in the space. tl;dr the merger doesn't change anything for most of us

Who knew that the future surveillance state was going to be brought to you by Amazon Ring cams? (Not exactly shocking that this would be driven by corporations)

Apache Iceberg North Carolina Community Meetup is back November 19th!! Register here: luma.com/4vj17iue If you’d like to give a talk at this or a future event, drop us a proposal: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

One day the industry will recognize the drawbacks of AI agents and nondeterministic automation, and rediscover the UNIX philosophy of chaining together small purpose built tools in a low cost and predictable way, otherwise known as shell scripts.

We've open sourced QuackStore - a block-based caching extension for DuckDB! 🦆 QuackStore dramatically speeds up queries on remote data by intelligently caching only the blocks you need. Now available as a DuckDB community extension: github.com/coginiti-dev...

You can now call ML models in DuckDB using the Infera extension, which is just pretty damn cool. #databs github.com/CogitatorTec...

Coming to Raleigh for All Things Open? We've got something special cooked for the data community. #databs #AllThingsOpen

Fivetran in negotiations to purchase dbt labs, this after just acquiring SQLMesh. I’m sure they aren’t the only bidders, but should they win it’s hard to imagine they keep two data transformation frameworks in operation. Great for Coginiti to see competitors rolled up. #databs

Great turnout for our Low-Key data meetup in Raleigh last night. Wonderful catching up with so many regulars and meeting the new people that showed up! Lots of great conversations about people, processes, careers, and the personal highlight for me... meeting someone building ml for chicken sexing!

It’s really cool to see what’s getting built using the components of the composable data stack like Apache Datafusion, Apache Arrow, and Apache Iceberg. Cloudflare’s R2SQL is just another example of what’s possible. Hey @columnar.tech where is the driver for this?