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AI Opportunities for Business: Stop Looking for Use Cases. Start Looking for Friction
Stop searching for AI use cases. Find practical AI opportunities by identifying workflow friction, repetition and manual work.
8 min read


LLM Cost Optimisation: The Cheapest Request Is the One You Never Send
LLM cost optimisation starts before the API call. Learn how caching, deterministic logic, retrieval and precomputation can eliminate unnecessary model requests.
8 min read


Shadow AI: Your Business Is Already Using AI. Do You Know Where?
Shadow AI may already be operating in your business. Learn how to discover which AI tools your team uses, what data they share and where the opportunities and risks are.
10 min read


AI Architecture: Stop Sending Everything to an LLM
LLMs are powerful, but they should not be the default processing layer for every task. A practical framework for deciding what belongs in code, retrieval, algorithms and AI reasoning.
8 min read


AI Agent Security Risks: Why Coding Agents Keep Breaking Trust Boundaries
AI coding agents have had a difficult few months for security. In July, researchers demonstrated that a public GitHub issue could manipulate an agent into retrieving information from a private repository. Another piece of research showed how symbolic links could undermine the approval controls used by six different coding assistants. Separately, developers have reported coding agents executing destructive database operations without adequately signaling the consequences. Thes
8 min read


AI Data Sovereignty: Where Does Your Data Go When It Passes Through an AI Model?
Most organisations know exactly which data centre region their core platform lives in. Almost none can answer the same question for AI. Here's where your data actually goes the moment it touches an AI model, and why the answer matters more than most governance frameworks currently account for.
7 min read


What Is AI Engineering? A Practical Guide to the Discipline, the Skills, and How to Build the Practice
AI engineering isn't data science, data engineering, or traditional software engineering — it's a distinct discipline sitting at the intersection of all three. Whether you're building the capability yourself, hiring for it, or leading a team through it, here's a working definition
11 min read


Building (and actually shipping) a custom Databricks Lakeflow connector for Xero
Databricks' community connector framework got us part of the way to a Xero-to-Lakehouse integration, but not all the way. Here's what it took to finish the job properly — four platform-internal bugs, a decision to rewrite rather than fork someone else's code, and why we're open-sourcing what came out of it.
5 min read


The Build vs. Buy Paradigm Has Flipped — But Not Where You Think
A $600,000 Salesforce contract, cancelled in two months. Enterprise transformations that run for years, weighed down by governance nobody could shortcut. Having worked inside both, I know why these aren't really the same debate — and that gap is the part worth talking about.
5 min read


Data Team 2026: Why Integration and AI Belong Inside It, Not Beside It
Most organisations still run separate data, integration, and AI teams — three roadmaps, three toolchains, three reporting lines. That separation made sense when each function had genuinely distinct skills. It doesn't hold up as well now. Here's the case for a converged data team, and what it should actually look like.
7 min read


Row and Column Level Security in Unity Catalog: ABAC, Table-Level Filters, and Dynamic Views Compared
Three genuinely different mechanisms exist for row and column level security in Unity Catalog. A practitioner's guide to what each one is actually for — and the one mistake that trips up more rollouts than any misconfigured filter
5 min read


The AI Paradox: Why Faster Code Isn't Producing Faster Delivery
GitLab's 2026 AI Accountability Report surveyed 1,528 developers and technology buyers. The finding worth sitting with: 78% code faster with AI, but overall software delivery hasn't accelerated. The bottleneck didn't disappear — it moved. What this means for Data Integration, Analytics, and AI platform teams specifically
5 min read


Genie's Pay-As-You-Go Pricing: A Data Integration Analytics and AI Team Review Checklist
Databricks Genie moved to pay-as-you-go billing on 6 July 2026. This article sets out what the change requires of data team leaders, and what it requires of data engineers, analysts, and data scientists who use Genie directly, within a governed Data Integration, Analytics, and AI capability
7 min read


Building a CDF History Table That Outlives Your VACUUM Window
A CDF history table captures every Delta Lake change permanently — independent of VACUUM retention. Here's the pattern, the schema evolution handling, and the partitioning strategy that scales
6 min read


Is AI Going to Kill Data Engineering Jobs? No — But the Job Is Already Changing
Data and analytics job postings are down twice as much as the broader tech market. At the same time, engineering hiring overall is resilient, and AI agents now build the majority of new databases on major platforms. Here's what the actual data says is happening
5 min read


SCD Type 2 Databricks: Why APPLY CHANGES INTO Replaced 200 Lines of MERGE Logic
SCD Type 2 Databricks implementation compared — manual MERGE logic versus Lakeflow's APPLY CHANGES INTO. Working code, gotchas, and migration lessons from real production pipelines
7 min read


Claude or Copilot? You're Asking the Wrong Question
Vendors are already converging on multi-model routing. We explain the five questions that actually determine whether AI agents create value for your business — and why they matter more than which platform you standardise on.
6 min read


Delta Lake Change Data Feed in Production: Six Things That Will Break Your Pipeline
Change Data Feed in Databricks looks simple in the documentation. In production, it breaks in six distinct ways — and each one is silent until something downstream stops working. This is what I learned building CDF pipelines on Azure Databricks.
7 min read


Tokenmaxxing: The Hidden Cost Reshaping How Organisations Use AI in Data Engineering
Tokenmaxxing — the practice of treating AI token consumption as a measure of productivity — emerged from Silicon Valley in early 2026. It is now showing up in data engineering teams across industries, and the costs are less visible but no less real
5 min read


Claude Databricks Integration: What You Need in Place Before You Get Started
Anthropic has published an official integration between Claude and Databricks — giving teams the ability to ask questions of their data in plain English. Here is what your environment needs to look like before that capability actually works.
7 min read
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