It’s time for a modern metadata solution, one that is just as fast, flexible, and scalable as the rest of the modern data stack — 2020 brought a lot of new words into our everyday vocabulary — think coronavirus, defund, and malarkey. But in the data world, another phrase has been making the rounds… the modern data stack. The data world has recently converged around the best set of tools for dealing with massive amounts…

Active metadata is like hot gossip. Here’s why. — Just like data mesh or the metrics layer, active metadata is the latest hot topic in the data world. As with every other new concept that gains popularity in the data stack, there’s been a sudden explosion of vendors rebranding to “active metadata”, ads following you everywhere and… confusion. With…

Hot takes on what we get wrong about the metrics layer and where it fits in the modern data stack — The metrics layer has been all the rage in 2022. It’s just forming in the data stack, but I’m so excited to see it coming alive. Recently dbt Labs incorporated a metrics layer into their product, and Transform open-sourced MetricFlow (their metric creation framework). A few weeks ago, I was…

Let’s visit a website just to “browse the metadata,” said no one ever — Last Friday, Data Twitter was buzzing with Josh Wills’ tweet about metadata and business intelligence. At Atlan, we started as a data team, and we failed three times at implementing a data catalog. As a data leader who saw these projects fail, I found that the biggest reason data…

How activating your metadata can power the Data Mesh dream — Discoverable. Understandable. Trustworthy. These are just a few of the key ideas of a Data Mesh infrastructure. Go through all of them and you’ll quickly find a common element that’s key to achieving each one — metadata. Today, metadata has become big data. Every component of the modern data stack…

Thanks to “Bundlegate”, it’s been a wild couple of weeks. Here’s what happened and where I think we’re going. — It’s been a wild couple of weeks in Data Twitter with another new hot debate. As I lay tossing and turning in bed, thinking about the future of the modern data stack, I couldn’t help feel the pressure to write yet another opinion piece ;) What actually happened? If you were MIA…

TL;DR: We raised $50M led by Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, and Insight with participation from existing investors, valuing us at $450M. — Today’s announcement is surreal. At Atlan, we began as a data team ourselves and were frustrated by how difficult it was to manage our work. It felt like an uphill climb to share data, document knowledge, track changes, save work, and more. …

These trends have converged to create a storm around a new, modern idea of metadata. — Last year, we hit some major landmarks in the world of metadata. Gartner scrapped its Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management, companies started asking for third-generation data catalogs, and modern metadata companies (like mine!) launched and raised some serious VC money. All of this actually prompted me to add metadata as…

A curated list of the year’s best articles from the data world — For the modern data stack world, this year has been a series of new companies entering the space, funding announcements, some wars, and lots of fun data memes. Can we call this the year when the “modern data stack” finally became mainstream? Well, only time will tell… But there’s definitely…