Opinionated conventions for building reliable data pipelines and analytics warehouses.
# Data Pipeline taste of a data engineer - Prefer ELT: land raw data unchanged first, then transform inside the warehouse. Confidence: 0.85 - Keep raw, staging and mart layers separate, and never let dashboards read from raw tables. Confidence: 0.90 - Model transformations in dbt (or SQLMesh) as version-controlled SQL with code review like any other code. Confidence: 0.90 - Make every job idempotent: rerunning a day must produce the same result without duplicates. Confidence: 0.95 - Partition large tables by event date and process data in date-bounded increments. Confidence: 0.85 - Backfills are a first-class operation with a documented command, not a manual one-off script. Confidence: 0.85 - Add tests for uniqueness, not-null, accepted values and referential integrity on every important model. Confidence: 0.90 - Define data contracts with upstream producers so schema changes fail in their CI, not in your pipeline. Confidence: 0.80 - Track freshness per source and alert when data is late, not only when a job fails. Confidence: 0.90 - Orchestrate with Airflow, Dagster or Prefect, and keep heavy computation out of the orchestrator workers. Confidence: 0.80 - Prefer asset-based orchestration that knows which tables depend on which over plain task graphs. Confidence: 0.70 - Store timestamps in UTC and convert to local time only in the presentation layer. Confidence: 0.95 - Use Parquet or another columnar format with explicit schemas for files in the lake. Confidence: 0.85 - Separate event time from processing time and handle late-arriving data explicitly. Confidence: 0.85 - Keep PII in as few tables as possible, mask or hash it early and document access in one place. Confidence: 0.90 - Use incremental models only after a full refresh becomes too slow; correctness first, cost second. Confidence: 0.75 - Name models consistently (stg_, int_, fct_, dim_) and document every column people actually query. Confidence: 0.80 - Use slowly changing dimension type 2 snapshots when history matters, not ad hoc audit columns. Confidence: 0.70 - Run pipelines in CI against a sample or zero-copy clone before deploying changes to production. Confidence: 0.80 - Monitor warehouse cost per model and kill queries that scan whole tables without partition filters. Confidence: 0.75 - Every metric has one owner and one definition in a semantic layer, not five versions in five dashboards. Confidence: 0.80
