Category: Platform & Data Engineering

How to manage spiralling cloud costs

“81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending by C-suite” VentureBeats, 2022 “Organisations with little or no cloud cost optimisation plans end up overspending on cloud services by up to 70% without deriving the expected value from it”  Gartner, 2022 Big Tech under pressure from cost-conscious cloud customers (ft.com) The cost of…

What are the challenges of building a data platform?

When building a data platform for your business, you need to anticipate and plan for any potential challenges you may encounter. That’s where a data engineering specialist can help.  With decades of data experience behind us, we’ve seen and dealt with practically every problem you might encounter during data platform development. In this guide, we’ll…

Why do you need a data platform?

If you’ve been exploring ways of optimising your data management and strategy, you’ve likely heard of or been recommended a data platform. But what is a data platform, and do you really need one for efficient data management?  In this guide, we’ll share the benefits and capabilities of a bespoke data platform so that you…

What is a data platform?

In today’s digitised business landscape, the ability to collect, analyse, and manage data effectively can be the critical difference between a business’s success and failure. But what exactly enables businesses to harness the full potential of their data? Enter the customer data platform. In this blog, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about data…

Taming your data assets with Databricks

Safely, securely, and efficiently handling data at any scale is challenging. Here at Oakland, we’ve had years of experience helping complex organisations tame their vast data assets to draw meaningful insights from them. These years of experience and the fact we are passionately tech-agnostic enable us to recommend the right tool for the job. One…

Azure Bicep – Deploy a Data Platform in One Click

Azure Bicep is a declarative language for Azure infrastructure, it is the successor of ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates. Bicep is one of the languages through which Azure has enabled the deployment of IaC (Infrastructure as Code).   What is Infrastructure as Code Infrastructure as Code is the declaration of compute, networking and infrastructure resources…

Is Starburst The Analytics Engine for Data Mesh?

At Oakland, we’re proudly tech agnostic. What does that actually mean? We can work with whatever tech our clients already have or have set their sights on using. That doesn’t mean we can’t review or recommend tech solutions, but we don’t receive any incentives to push one solution over another. We like it that way…

Prefect: Should you utilise the next generation of data pipelining software?

What is data pipelining, and why does it matter? Data pipelining, or orchestration is an everyday activity performed by companies to move their data from one place, likely the primary storage location, to another, such as a cloud-based data lake, often including transformations during this process. Whilst this is a standard operational activity, the number…

Replicating Data Warehouse with Databricks Lakehouse

Introduction In a recent post, we outlined what a Databricks Lakehouse encompasses and why you may want to utilise one rather than a Data Warehouse and/or Data Lake. Following that introduction, this post will walk through an example use case, including code, for how the Databricks Lakehouse replicates some common warehousing patterns while having the…

The Pro’s and Con’s of using Data Lakehouse

When using your Data Platform to improve your Business Intelligence with useful dashboards, and reports, you’ll more than likely want to use a Data Warehouse. Add on your data science builds and storing your raw data cheaply, plus adding a Data Lake just for good measure, and the costs soon start adding up. Running both…

Why bigger isn’t always better…. Maximising returns through cloud-based proof of concepts:

Part 1 – Starting out and getting over the first hurdle!  So, about ALL of that data you have…  Pushing data into the cloud was once seen as a skill confined to tech companies, who had either started with at least one foot in the door or had the skills readily available to make it happen. However,  it is now much more commonplace for organisations to want to lift and shift their data and operations…