The newsletter for data leaders who actually ship
Every other Tuesday. Actionable insights on data strategy, AI agents, semantic layers, and the modern stack. Join 500+ data leaders reading the issue they don't archive.
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No fluff. Just things worth reading.
Every other Tuesday
Biweekly cadence. Long enough to say something useful, short enough to respect your inbox.
Practical, not promotional
Real architectures, real tradeoffs, real teardowns. No vendor fluff, no recycled Medium takes.
Written for data leaders
Heads of data, CDOs, analytics engineering leads — if you ship data systems for a living, this is for you.
Recent editions
A taste of what's inside
- 01Data Foundation·12 min read
The Open Data Stack: Parquet, Iceberg, Polaris, Ossie
Apache Parquet, Iceberg, Polaris, and Ossie now cover every layer of the data stack with open, vendor-neutral standards. Here is what each layer does, how they compose, and what it means for AI-ready data architecture.
- 02Semantic Layer·9 min read
Apache Ossie: The Rename Is Not the Story
OSI is now Apache Ossie (Incubating). The rename is cosmetic. The governance transfer to the Apache Software Foundation is the story — and what it signals for the semantic layer as infrastructure.
- 03Semantic Layer·9 min read
Semantic Layer Consulting & Data Architecture in Amsterdam
Unwind Data is an Amsterdam-based data consultancy specialising in semantic layer implementation and data architecture for scale-ups and enterprises building AI. Independent, vendor-neutral, and practitioner-led.
- 04Semantic Layer·16 min read
AtScale vs dbt Semantic Layer: Enterprise vs Engineering-First
AtScale and dbt Semantic Layer both promise a single source of truth for metrics. But they represent two completely different architectural philosophies and serve two different organizational realities. Here is the head-to-head comparison that vendor demos will not give you.
- 05AI Agents·11 min read
Snowflake Cortex Sense, CoCo and CoWork Explained
Snowflake shipped Cortex Sense, CoCo Desktop, and CoWork at Summit 26. Cortex Sense is the context runtime that sits between the model and the data. Here is what each product does and why the three form a coherent agentic stack.
- 06Semantic Layer·11 min read
Snowflake Horizon Context: What It Does to the OSI
Snowflake announced Horizon Context at Summit 26: a unified active context layer sitting on Horizon Catalog, serving AI agents, BI tools, and the Cortex stack from one place. Here is what it actually is, and what it does to the OSI question.
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