Articles that proclaim "something is dead" are dead!

Death to crap marketing!!!

Last week Dashboards were declared dead.

Before that it was Star Schemas.

Data modelling (of any flavour) has also been read its last rites on several occasions.

One vendor once declared Data Warehouses were dead …before swiftly pivoting to market there product as a Data Warehousing tool.

Back in the twenty-teens, calling SQL dead was pretty trendy too.

Stop it marketeers. It’s lazy and boring.

Data is a somewhat paradoxical world to live in. On the one hand, everything moves so quickly. I think it’s an industry that’s inherently innovative.

But on the flipside, so much stays the same.

Technologies come and go. But a hell of a lot of the fundamental theory remains.

Every now and again a technological breakthrough might enter the stage as a disruptor. All of a sudden, straying from the proven approaches of the past is no longer needed. Product X is the cure! No longer will you need to do the hard thing that makes your job hard (i.e. the reason you earn your crust)… until you realise too late, that doing basic things well would have served you better in the long run, and now you’ve got a bunch of technical debt to accommodate.

Data Lakes and schema-on-read made analytics easy right? NoSQL databases were going to be the saviour of analytics at some point weren’t they?

In many ways, this disruption is welcome. It’s good to challenge your beliefs! But quite often we end up falling back on the tried and tested. Or at least, finding ways to optimise the new technological approach using tried and tested old world theories.

So really, we end up with evolution, not extinction.

So… does GenAI spell the end for dashboards? I don’t think so. Folks will always appreciate a visual means to explain their data. Will we see a rise in chatbot type experiences, allowing more conversational data storytelling? Yes, I think we will, but there’s no reason the two approaches can’t co-exist and even complement each other? (“Alexa, explain this dashboard to me?” feels like a great concept).

Are Star Schemas dead? Well, there are other data modelling options available. Tools such as Power BI, Thoughtspot or even Databricks Genie all work better with a Star Schema though. So no, Star Schemas aren’t going anywhere. If you’re not using those technologies? Well fine, I’m sure there are alternatives that may suit your needs better.

Don’t let anyone’s marketing department ever convince you a concept is dead.

Some concepts may not be suitable for your current use case, or be the best approach to optimise for your current goals.

But for the right scenario and use case, there is always some life left in the already known.

So, stop it marketeers.

Evolution not extinction.

Embrace, don’t disgrace.