Data Engineering
How Do You Stop an Alert Storm When One Table Breaks?
Thirty alerts, one cause. Cooldowns and daily limits do not fix that, because the problem is not volume. It is that nothing knows the alerts are related.
Data Engineering
Data Quality
What Is a Data Contract and Do You Actually Need One?
A data contract is enforced in the producer's pipeline. Most teams asking for one actually want monitoring. How to tell which you need.
Data Quality
dbt Tests vs Data Observability: Where Each One Stops
dbt tests check assertions you wrote, at build time, on tables dbt owns. Every word in that sentence is a boundary. Here is what lives outside each one.
Data Quality
What Is the Best Datafold Alternative in 2026?
Datafold's CEO wrote in March that data quality "didn't pan out" as a category, and pivoted. If you bought it for data quality, that is your answer.
Data Quality
What Is the Best Elementary Alternative in 2026?
Elementary is genuinely open source and genuinely good. The question is what happens to the tables dbt never touches, and what June's merger changed.
Data Engineering
How to Get Lineage From a dbt Manifest Without a Migration
Your dbt project already contains a complete dependency graph. It is sitting in target/manifest.json, and getting it out takes one command.
Data Quality
What Is the Best Soda Alternative in 2026?
Soda's 2026 pricing is public, Soda Core is no longer open source, and nobody exports to ODCS. An honest comparison, including where Soda wins.
Data Engineering
How Do You Find the Blast Radius of a Broken Table?
One table breaks and forty alerts follow. Lineage turns that noise into a named root cause and a list of exactly what went stale.
Data Quality
What Is the Best Great Expectations Alternative in 2026?
Great Expectations is free to install and expensive to maintain. What the alternatives change, and how to port your suites without losing them.
Data Observability
Data Quality Agents Compared: Monte Carlo, Acceldata, and the Agent-Native Approach
Monte Carlo, Acceldata, and Datadog's Metaplane all ship data quality agents now. Most are a language model bolted onto a legacy dashboard. Here's an honest comparison of the agent approaches and where an agent-native tool fits.
Data Observability
OKF vs RAG for Data Warehouse Context: Why We Chose a Living Knowledge Base
Google's Open Knowledge Format (OKF) formalizes the "LLM Wiki" pattern: give an agent a curated markdown knowledge base instead of RAG over raw chunks. We've run a variation of that for warehouse context since 2025. Here's why a living knowledge base beats RAG, and where RAG still wins.
Data Observability
How AI-Native Data Observability Changes Incident Response
Most data observability tools shorten the time to know something broke. AI-native observability shortens the time to know what broke, what depends on it, and what to do next. Here is what that workflow actually looks like during a real incident.