Ahmed Elsamadisi, founder and CEO of Narrator.ai, presents the query efficiency benefits of using a single Activity Stream table instead of complex relational tables at Data Driven NYC.
“The really fascinating thing here is that the query is so consistent. I can literally reuse the same query and combine layers of questions, all using the same structure, all being answered by the same table, bridging these systems invisibly.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ahmed Elsamadisi
Insight
Elsamadisi: Buying Looker requires hiring five to six BI engineers
“All it ends up doing is you end up having to hire a team of five or six BI engineers to write LookML and maintain these systems for you.”
Ahmed ElsamadisiNov 13, 2019▶ 3:43How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Elsamadisi: Companies can replace hundreds of database tables with one time-series table
“So, instead of hundreds of fact and dimension tables, you can just have one time series table centered around a customer.”
Ahmed ElsamadisiNov 13, 2019▶ 6:15How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Elsamadisi: Narrator reduced 40-hour Looker queries to just 10 minutes
“We've taken queries that were taking, like, literally 40 hours in Looker, and we've dropped them down to, like, 10 minutes. Queries that cross billions of rows end up happening in, like, seven to eight seconds on a warehouse.”
Ahmed ElsamadisiNov 13, 2019▶ 17:47How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
AssertionContradicted
Elsamadisi: Redshift, Snowflake, and BigQuery perform identically on long tables
“The speed improvement on Redshift and versus Snowflake versus BigQuery becomes interchangeable. Because what they handle is for those edge cases, we have like a bunch of, like Snowflake is really good at a bunch of small tables everywhere trying to load a memo…”
Ahmed ElsamadisiNov 13, 2019▶ 18:26How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Elsamadisi: Data tools tend to add more complexity than they solve
“Tools tend to add a lot more complexity than they actually end up solving.”
Ahmed ElsamadisiNov 13, 2019▶ 2:16How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Elsamadisi: Traditional data software builds dashboards, not answers
“Well, it turns out that all these tools and all these systems are designed to help you build dashboards, not really answer questions.”
Ahmed ElsamadisiNov 13, 2019▶ 4:40How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.