Alex Merced — Developer and technical writer sharing in-depth insights on data engineering, Apache Iceberg, data lakehouse architectures, Python tooling, and modern analytics platforms, with a strong focus on practical, hands-on learning.
610 articles from this blog
Explores data clean rooms for privacy-preserving analytics, covering core guarantees, platforms like Databricks and AWS, and real-world use cases.
Explores building modular query engines using Rust runtimes like Apache DataFusion, focusing on composability over monolithic designs.
A practical analysis of data mesh implementation, covering what works and what doesn't after years of production use.
Explores how dbt Fusion, a Rust-based rewrite of dbt Core, transforms analytics engineering by treating SQL as first-class code with AST parsing and static analysis.
Explores using DuckDB and Polars to query and write to Iceberg tables, covering new features, workflows, and practical patterns.
Explains how to use the FOCUS 1.3 open billing standard for FinOps on data warehouses, enabling cost attribution and optimization across providers.
Explains how to design governed RAG systems using data products, separating retrieval and governance for accurate, policy-compliant AI responses.
Apache Kafka 4.0 removes ZooKeeper, introduces KRaft mode, new consumer rebalance protocol, and queues for Kafka, impacting platform operations.
Explains how Apache Iceberg V3 improves CDC pipelines with deletion vectors and row lineage, solving delete file accumulation.
Explores using Lance and Iceberg formats for multimodal AI data, addressing scan-heavy analytics vs. random-access retrieval for ML training.
Explores integrating MLflow 3 with data pipelines for unified observability, covering data lineage, drift detection, and CI/CD for ML.
Explores modern feature stores beyond batch pipelines, covering streaming features, two-store models, and real-time ML inference.
Explains how OpenLineage provides a standardized API for data lineage, enabling faster incident investigation and data observability across the stack.
Compares Apache Paimon and Iceberg for handling mutable streams, focusing on Paimon's LSM-tree architecture for high-frequency updates.
Explores policy-as-code for lakehouse governance using ABAC, OPA, and cloud-native tools to replace RBAC with scalable, query-time data access controls.
A technical guide on building real-time lakehouse architectures using Apache Flink 2.1 and the Dynamic Iceberg Sink, addressing schema drift, file proliferation, and operational rigidity.
Explores modern single-node data engineering tools like DuckDB, DataFusion, Polars, and LakeSail built on Apache Arrow for high-performance analytics.
Explains how semantic layers improve enterprise Text-to-SQL accuracy from 40% to 85-95% by providing structured context for AI.
A guide comparing vector stores like pgvector, Milvus, Weaviate, and LanceDB for retrieval workloads, focusing on index types and tradeoffs.
Overview of Apache Iceberg 1.11.0 release, covering new features like metadata encryption, pluggable file formats, and query optimizations.
