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SQL Tells You What. Comments Tell You Why.

The best SQL doesn’t need comments. Write meaningful CTE names, descriptive aliases, clear column labels — and a skilled reader will follow your logic without a single annotation. That’s the right instinct. It’s also only half right. SQL is a declarative language. You’re not writing how the database retrieves your data; you’re writing what you want. That’s a useful distinction, because “what” and “why” are very different questions, and SQL can answer exactly one of them.

Saturday, June 6, 2026 Read
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Write-Audit-Publish with Iceberg Tables in Snowflake

It was a Tuesday afternoon when the analyst pinged me on Microsoft Teams: “Hey, the Total Portfolio numbers just jumped 40% overnight. Did we land a whale?” We hadn’t. What actually happened was more mundane and significantly more painful. A schema change in the source system introduced a currency conversion bug. Our pipeline dutifully loaded the corrupted data into production at 3 AM, the dashboards updated by 6 AM, and the Department Head opened her morning report to numbers that looked like champagne-worthy growth.

Friday, February 27, 2026 Read
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Healing Tables: When Day-by-Day Backfills Become a Slow-Motion Disaster

It was 2 AM on a Saturday when I realized we’d been loading data wrong for six months. The situation: a customer dimension with three years of history needed to be backfilled after a source system migration. The previous team’s approach was straightforward—run the daily incremental process 1,095 times, once for each day of history. They estimated three weeks to complete. What they hadn’t accounted for was how errors compound. By the time I looked at the data, we had 47,000 records with overlapping date ranges, 12,000 timeline gaps where customers seemed to vanish and reappear, and an unknowable number of missed changes from when source systems updated the same record multiple times in a single day.

Saturday, February 7, 2026 Read