Document Intelligence Studio is a data extraction tool that can pull unstructured data from diverse documents, including invoices, contracts, bank statements, pay stubs, and health insurance cards. The cloud-based tool from Microsoft Azure comes with several prebuilt models designed to extract data from popular document types. However, you can also use labeled datasets to train…
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The post Alternatives to Azure Document Intelligence Studio: Exploring Powerful Document Analysis Tools appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

When I broke into the data world, everyone wanted to hire data scientists that would let their companies become more data driven. There were statistics about the exabytes of data that we were creating and the value it would provide. However, a few years into my career, the data world started to make a pivot…
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The post Preparing Your Data Infrastructure for 2025: Lessons from the Past, Strategies for the Future appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Scraping data from PDFs is a right of passage if you work in data. Someone somewhere always needs help getting invoices parsed, contracts read through, or dozens of other use cases. Most of us will turn to Python and our trusty list of Python libraries and start plugging away. Of course, there are many challenges…
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The post Challenges You Will Face When Parsing PDFs With Python – How To Parse PDFs With Python appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

There are plenty of statistics about the speed at which we are creating data in today’s modern world. On the flip side of all that data creation is a need to manage all of that data and thats where data teams come in. But leading these data teams is challenging and yet many new data…
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The post From IC to Data Leader: Key Strategies for Managing and Growing Data Teams appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Much of the data we have used for analysis in traditional enterprises has been structured data. It’s easy for humans to break down, understand, and, in turn, find insights from it. However, much of the data that is being created and will be created comes in some form of unstructured format. However, the digital era…
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The post What is Unstructured Data? A Guide to Storage, Processing, and Analysis appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

A key responsibility for any data team is to understand the core metrics driving their business. Starting from the top, these metrics often include figures like gross revenue and expenses. However, these high-level metrics can feel too far removed and abstract from the actual business.  Many companies, therefore, break down these top-line metrics into more…
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The post How Data Teams Drive Business Success by Understanding Core Metrics appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Recently, I’ve encountered a few projects that used AWS DMS, which is almost like an ELT solution. Whether it was moving data from a local database instance to S3 or some other data storage layer. It was interesting to see AWS DMS used in this manner. But it’s not what DMS was built for. As…
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The post What Is AWS DMS And Why You Shouldn’t Use It As An ELT appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Leading data teams can be challenging. You’ve got management and non-technical teams constantly reaching out with ad-hoc data requests; you’re likely trying to figure out what tools will work best and not blow the bank. Not to mention, you’ve got to bridge the gap between business and technology. All while trying to grow your data…
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The post 9 Must-Watch Videos for Aspiring Data Leaders: Bridging Tech and Business for Data Team Success appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

If you work in data, then at some point in your career, you’ll likely need to parse data from a PDF. You might need to parse thousands of PDFs in order to pull out invoice information. Or maybe you need to parse financial filing documents such as 10-Ks. This can seem challenging at first. Afterall,…
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The post How To Automate PDF Data Extraction – 3 Different Methods To Parse PDFs For Analytics appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

We are still in the early days of data and the value it can add to companies. You’ll read plenty of statistics about how much value data can drive and how far behind companies that aren’t using data are. And as a data consultant, I have helped companies find that value in their data. It…
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The post How To Modernize Your Data Strategy And Infrastructure For 2025 appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

One of the holy grails that many data teams seem to chase is real-time data analytics. After all, if you can have real-time analytics, you can make better decisions faster. However, there often is a conflation between real-time data analytics and stream processing.  These are two different concepts that are crucial to understanding how to…
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The post Real-time Analytics Vs Stream Processing – What Is The Difference? appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

If you work in data, then AI is everywhere at this point.  But whether AI is hype or reality doesn’t change the fact that data engineers will play a major role in ensuring that the data sets that are utilized for the growing use cases are usable both by machines and humans. Whether that data…
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The post Essential Skills for Data Engineers in the Age of AI appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

What would you do if you became the head or director of data for a 1,000-person company? Yesterday, you were plugging along as an analyst, and now, suddenly, you have all these new responsibilities. Figuring out where to start is part of the job. You’d probably feel a strong temptation to freak out. Who wouldn’t?…
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The post How To Run A Data Team As A New Head Of Data appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Running a successful data team is hard. Data teams are expected to juggle a combination of ad-hoc requests, big bet projects, migrations, etc. All while keeping up with the latest changes in technology. In the past few years I have gotten to work with dozens of teams and see how various directors and managers deal…
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The post 9 Habits Of Effective Data Managers – Running A Data Team appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

How companies data model varies widely. They might say they use Kimball dimensional modeling. However, when you look in their data warehouse the only part you recognize is the word fact and dim. Over the past near decade, I have worked for and with different companies that have used various methods to capture this data.…
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The post How To Data Model – Real Life Examples Of How Companies Model Their Data appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Many data engineers and analysts don’t realize how valuable the knowledge they have is. They’ve spent hours upon hours learning SQL, Python, how to properly analyze data, build data warehouses, and understand the differences between eight different ETL solutions. Even what they might think is basic knowledge could be worth $10,000 to $100,000+ for a…
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The post Why Data Analysts And Engineers Make Great Consultants appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Getting data out of source systems and into a data warehouse or data lake is one of the first steps in making it usable by analysts and data scientists. The question is how will your team do that? Will they write custom data connectors, pay for a data connector out of the box or perhaps…
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The post 4 ELT Alternatives To Airbyte – How To Ingest Your Data appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

If you’ve worked in data long enough, then you’ve likely come across the term change data capture. Often called CDC, change data capture involves tracking and recording changes in a database as they happen, and then transmitting these changes to designated targets. This can be crucial because some pipelines, in particular batch pipelines, don’t capture…
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The post Terms You Should Know If You’re Planning To Use Change Data Capture appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

As data increased in volume, velocity, and variety, so, in turn, did the need for tools that could help process and manage those larger data sets coming at us at ever faster speeds. As a result, frameworks such as Apache Spark and Apache Flink became popular due to their abilities to handle big data processing…
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The post Apache Spark Vs Apache Flink – What Is The Difference? appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

How data is structured, managed and processed will continue to grow in importance as the demand for AI and machine learning increase. It’s unavoidable that as businesses demand that their data teams implement AI, they will also realize that data engineers are a crucial piece of the data pipeline. That means, if you’re looking for…
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The post 10 Great Videos To Help You Learn Data Engineering appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Have you ever been part of a data or software project that seems stuck in a loop? Three weeks have passed, and although you arrive at work daily, exhausted, having tackled numerous issues, the project remains stagnant. Why? Then, suddenly, a new engineer or project manager steps in, reorganizes and prioritizes tasks, and just like…
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The post Common Pitfalls of Data Analytics Projects appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Recently, I wrote an article diving into what Druid is and which companies are using it. Now I wanted to do a deeper dive into Apache Druid’s architecture. Apache Druid has several unique features that allow it to be used as a real-time OLAP. Everything from its various nodes and processes that each have unique…
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The post Apache Druid’s Architecture – How Druid Processes Data In Real Time At Scale appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

No matter your industry, you’ll often need to make split-second business decisions in the digital age. Real-time data can help you do just that. It’s information that’s made available as soon as it’s created, meaning you don’t need to wait around for the insights you need. Real-time data processing can satisfy the ever-increasing demand for…
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The post 5 Real-Time Data Processing and Analytics Technologies – And Where You Can Implement Them appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) comes with a lot of functionality useful for extracting, transforming, and loading data. It can also play important roles in application development and other projects. But SSIS is far from the only platform that can provide these services. You might seek alternatives to SSIS because you want a more agile…
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The post Alternatives to SSIS(SQL Server Integration Services) – How To Migrate Away From SSIS appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.

Companies that range from start-ups to enterprises are looking to implement AI and ML into their data strategy. With that it’s important not to forget about data quality. Regardless of how fancy or sophisticated a company’s AI model might be, poor data quality will break it. It will make the outputs of these models useless…
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The post Why Your Team Needs To Implement Data Quality For Your AI Strategy appeared first on Seattle Data Guy.