Posts
All the articles I've posted.
- 16 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol Release Candidate: What the Stateless Spec Means for Data Platforms
The date in this topic matters. Today is July 6, 2026. A release candidate dated July 28, 2026 is still in the future. That means this article shou...
model context protocolmcpdata platforms - 15 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
The Metric Contract Mandate: Standardizing Semantic Layers Before AI Agent Access
AI agents are very good at moving quickly. That is the opportunity and the risk. If an agent can inspect metadata, generate queries, compare result...
semantic layersmetric contractsai agents - 16 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
Multi-Engine Catalog Federation with Apache Polaris: Syncing Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure Metadata
Open table formats changed the data lakehouse conversation, but they did not finish it. A table can be stored in an open format and still be hard t...
apache polariscatalog federationmulticloud - 28 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
Open Source Foundations, Explained: What Apache, Linux, Eclipse, and Their Peers Actually Do, and Why Governance Differences Matter
Writing about open data and AI means repeating the same phrases over and over: donated to the Apache Software Foundation, incubating at the Linux F...
open sourcefoundationsapache - 26 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
Operational vs. Analytical Systems: Why the Oldest Divide in Data Exists, What Physics Enforces It, and the Honest Truth About Hybrid Systems
Every data architecture ever drawn contains the same fault line, so old and so universal that most engineers stop seeing it: on one side, the syste...
oltpolaphtap - 30 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
Personal Context vs. Shared Context: A Deep Dive Into How Humans and Organizations Should Feed Their AI Agents
The most important discovery of the agent era fits in one sentence: most AI failures are context failures, not model failures. When your assistant...
personal contextshared contextai agents - 15 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
Designing Private, Air-Gapped Data Lakehouses: Scaling Iceberg in Highly Secure, On-Premises Clouds
Some of the most important lakehouse work happens in environments that will never look like a simple public-cloud reference architecture. Defense...
air-gappeddata lakehouseiceberg - 15 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
Migrating Proprietary Warehouses to Open Lakehouses: The 2026 Playbook for Zero-Copy Metadata Translation
Every warehouse migration sounds simpler before the first inventory. Then the team discovers old dashboards, hidden dependencies, undocumented stor...
migrationlakehousemetadata translation - 28 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
Lakehouse Table Formats in 2026: Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, Paimon, and DuckLake, How They Work, Where They Stand, and Where They're Going
The table format war is over, and the table formats are not. Both halves of that sentence are true, both matter, and the tension between them is ex...
table formatsicebergdelta lake - 15 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
Trustworthy Concurrency in the Agentic Lakehouse: Reconciling Academic Proofs with High-Frequency Production Writes
Agentic lakehouses change the concurrency conversation. Traditional data pipelines already deal with overlapping jobs, retries, compaction, merges...
concurrencyagentic lakehouseproduction writes - 30 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
When Gatekeepers Panic: The Encyclopédie, Open AI Models, and the Politics of Accessible Knowledge
The fight over open AI models mirrors the 18th-century suppression of Diderot's Encyclopédie, revealing the same pattern of institutional fear of accessible knowledge.
open source AIAI regulationopen weights - 30 MIN READ•Jul 6, 2026
The Who, What, and Why of Semantic Layers: The Layer That Decides Whether Your Numbers Can Be Trusted
There is a survey statistic making the rounds this year that I cannot stop quoting: 84 percent of data teams report regularly encountering conflict...
semantic layersanalyticsdata governance