Latest Articles: page 6
692 posts from Alex's blogs and newsletters, newest first. Thoughts on tech, data, policy, and philosophy.
The Decoupled Data Lakehouse: Multi-Engine Freedom with Open REST Catalogs
The decoupled data lakehouse: multi-engine freedom with open REST catalogs, credential vending, and an estate that outlives its tools....
The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse
The five layers of an agentic lakehouse: Storage, Catalog, Semantic, Gateway, and Agent Surface, and how one question travels through all of them....
Goal-Directed Data Quality Agents: Anomaly Quarantine on Apache Iceberg
Goal-directed data quality agents that watch Apache Iceberg tables, detect anomalies, and quarantine suspect data safely with snapshot isolation and b...
Managing the TCO of Agentic Analytics: Token Budgets, Query Throttles, and the Economics of Autonomy
Managing the total cost of agentic analytics: token budgets, query throttles, unit economics, and the FinOps discipline that keeps AI spend under cont...
Metric Contracts in 2026: Standardizing Business Logic Across Multi-Agent Frameworks
Metric contracts in 2026: versioned, testable definitions of business logic that let multi-agent frameworks compute revenue identically, with OSI inte...
Policy-Aware Lakehouse Telemetry: Building Auditable AI Records on Apache Iceberg for the EU AI Act Era
Policy-aware lakehouse telemetry for the EU AI Act era: build auditable, immutable, governed AI decision records on Apache Iceberg....
Query Routing at Machine Scale: Multi-Engine Workload Distribution for the Agentic Lakehouse
Query routing at machine scale for the agentic lakehouse: engine selection, acceleration substitution, admission control, and placement....
Securing the Agentic Lakehouse Gateway: A Threat Model for Prompt Injection, Exfiltration, and the Firewall That Reads Sentences
A threat model for the agentic lakehouse gateway covering prompt injection, exfiltration, and the firewall that reads sentences....
Semantic Layer Federation: One Meaning for Data That Lives Everywhere
Build a federated semantic layer across multi-cloud data so one set of governed metric definitions serves BI tools, dashboards, and AI agents identica...
Building Lightweight Serverless Ingestion to Apache Iceberg with PyIceberg and DuckDB
Build lightweight serverless ingestion to Apache Iceberg with PyIceberg and DuckDB, running small feeds in functions that bill for seconds....
Building Stateless AI Tool Gateways with FastMCP, the 2026 MCP Spec, and Kubernetes
How to build stateless AI tool gateways with FastMCP, the 2026 MCP specification, and Kubernetes, and why statelessness finally makes MCP scale....
Write-Audit-Publish with Apache Iceberg Branches: CI/CD for Your Data
Write-Audit-Publish with Apache Iceberg branches brings CI/CD to your data: stage, audit, then fast-forward to main so consumers never see unvalidated...
Zero-Copy Warehouse Modernization: Moving to Apache Iceberg Without Downtime
A practical guide to modernizing a data warehouse to Apache Iceberg without downtime, using federation first, then redirecting new data, then....
When Subsidies Raise the Price: Government Financing and the Cost of Healthcare, Housing, and Education
TL;DR Three of the largest household costs, healthcare, housing, and education, have outpaced general inflation for four consecutive decades....
The Plan and the Worker: Two Open Specifications for Agent Harnesses
Two open specifications, the Agentic Graph Specification and the Open Agent Profile, turn agent plans and agent identity into portable, reviewable fil...
Apache Arrow Flight and ADBC, and Why Database Connectivity Finally Went Columnar
Arrow Flight and ADBC move database results as columnar data, ending the row-oriented bottleneck between engines and applications. Here's how....
The Farm Bill Problem: How Agricultural Policy Hurts the Farmers It Claims to Protect
TL;DR American agricultural policy is one of the most consequential and least examined sets of government programs affecting the economy, the environm...
Budgeting for Agentic Analytics When Every Question Costs Something Different
Budgeting for agentic analytics when every question costs something different: token economics, query economics, instrumentation, and the cost control...
The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse and Where the MCP Server Sits
The five layers of an agentic lakehouse and where the MCP server sits: storage, catalog, semantic layer, MCP gateway, and agent surface, plus identity...
Autonomous Table Optimization When Your Query Workload Stops Being Predictable
Autonomous table optimization when query workloads stop being predictable: observing file layout and query patterns, scoring compaction work, adaptive...
Building Apache Iceberg Lakehouses That Run Without an Internet Connection
How to build an Apache Iceberg lakehouse that runs fully offline: storage, catalog, compute, cross-zone transfer, compliance, and the failure modes th...
Wiring Analytical Queries to Transactional APIs in Closed-Loop Decision Agents
Wiring analytical queries to transactional APIs in closed-loop decision agents: conditional writes, sagas with compensations, decision records, and bl...
Surviving Optimistic Commit Collisions When Hundreds of Agents Write to Iceberg
Surviving optimistic commit collisions when hundreds of agents write to Iceberg: which conflicts are real, commit buffers, partitioning, and the patte...
How Iceberg V3 Deletion Vectors Fixed Merge-on-Read for Streaming Tables
How Iceberg V3 deletion vectors replaced accumulating positional delete files and made merge-on-read viable for streaming and CDC tables....