Ahmed Elsamadisi - Narrator Data Blog

Does Incremental Modeling Truly Save Money? Avoiding Pitfalls for Data Engineers

Discover effective cost-saving strategies for data engineers to optimize incremental data processing. Learn how to overcome challenges and maximize the benefits of this powerful approach.

Rethink Your Metrics and Drive Meaningful Change

While big-picture metrics like total sales and annual recurring revenue (ARR) give you an overview, they don't provide the practical insights needed for real change.

Data Analysis

The Data Modeling Paradox: Are we sacrificing insights for structure?

While companies heavily rely on data to inform their strategies, the very data models they employ often hinder their ability to ask deep and insightful questions.

Data Engineering

Leaving Data Chaos Behind: A Paradigm Shift towards Activity-based Modeling

Explore a powerful approach that can revolutionize the way you understand and utilize data: modeling data as activities. Activities can bring clarity and organization to your data, allowing you to gain valuable insights and make the most of your data.

Announcements

The Data Stack Show Podcast

Eric and Kostas of The Data Stack Show invited Ahmed onto their podcast earlier this month to discuss the the modern data stack's achilles heel. You won't want to miss this deep dive.

Announcements

Startup Renegades Podcast

Earlier this month Ahmed sat down with Shauna Armitage to discuss building the right team, selling "the dream" during fund raising and the difference between building better and building different.

Data Analysis

How to keep your data clean with proper alerting from your data system

No data is perfect, and data quality practices and processes are absolutely critical to put in place before any analysis can be performed.

Announcements

What Gets Measured Podcast

Ahmed sat down with Jake from Ninjacat to chat about marketing and advertising analytics. Catch this deep dive on keeping your data systems from getting too messy and the importance of storytelling in reporting.

Data Engineering

How to calculate data warehouse cost and prevent it from exploding

A realistic way to estimate warehouse cost and techniques to prevent the warehouse cost from getting out of hand.

Data Engineering

The cost of product analytics data in your data warehouse

Syncing product analytics data into your warehouse is more expensive than you might think. This explains why, and what to do about it.

Announcements

Startup Life Podcast

Ahmed sat down with Ande last month on her Startup Life podcast and answered some questions live from listeners.

Announcements

thinkfuture Podcast

Ahmed sat down with Chris Kalaboukis on the thinkfuture podcast to discuss Narrator's mind bending abilities.

Data Analysis

What's missing from the Amplitude and Snowflake partnership

Amplitude and Snowflake's partnership is a great first pass at warehouse-powered data analytics. However, this sync is missing many data team requirements for a complex and secure production data system.

Announcements

Startup Mindset Podcast

Earlier this year Ahmed sat down with Dan and Jovanni on the Startup Mindset Podcast and discussed all things Narrator. You won't want to miss it!

Forget about the product

Last week at Narrator, we did an interesting product thinking exercise that reminded me of the incredible value of constantly going back to the customer and reasoning from there, so I thought I’d share what it was and why it ended up being so valuable for us. Here’s

Announcements

Marketing x Analytics Podcast

Ahmed was featured on the Marketing x Analytics podcast. Hear the full thing and see some excerpts about how to properly use data for marketing.

Announcements

Activity Schema at coalesce 2021

Ahmed presented the activity schema at dbt's coalesce 2021 conference, and explained why it's a better alternative to a star schema.

Trending

Helpful Postgres Queries

As with any performance advice, the only way to really improve things is to try things out and measure. Find long-running queries SELECT pid, now() - pg_stat_activity.query_start AS duration, usename, query, state, wait_event_type, wait_event FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE state = 'active' and (now(

Data Analysis

A guide to data-driven prioritization for product managers

PMs use data to prioritize, align their team, and communicate the impact of their work. How does this work in practice?

Announcements

Data Engineering Podcast

Ahmed joined the Data Engineering podcast to talk about Narrator and the activity schema

Announcements

Announcing the Analyze Button

Overview of the Analyze Button, the first self service data analysis tool. It creates a full analysis, with recommendations, in one click.

Data Analysis

What (actually) is self service analytics?

Why data-informed decisions are more important than broad access to data for self service analytics

SQL

PostgreSQL's missing DateDiff function

DATEDIFF is an extremely useful function for analytical queries. Given two timestamps it'll tell you how many days, weeks, months, hours, etc they are apart. Here we show an implementation of this function for Postgres.

Data Engineering

Shareable data analyses using templates

We've been using shared data analyses in production for three years. Here's how you can create reusable templates for common metrics and analyses.

SQL

Using PostgreSQL as a Data Warehouse

With some tweaking Postgres can be a great data warehouse. Here's how to configure it.