Metadata
- Author: Joel Labes
- Full Title:: I Unknowingly Built a (Bad) Semantic Layer in 2018
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Data Modeling,
- URL:: https://roundup.getdbt.com/p/i-unknowingly-built-a-bad-semantic
- Finished date:: 2023-08-22
Highlights
Instead of addressing a root cause: requests for change take a long time to resolve.
Since requests for change would take a long time to resolve and be a painful experience for all involved, some enterprising staff started finding workarounds. For example, they would export multiple existing reports to CSV, stick them together with VLOOKUPs 4 , and then work from that until the data became too stale to be useful. (View Highlight)
Each entity had its own grain, and since this all the data was precalculated and stored – instead of truly understanding joins – we had to limit what other information could be brought through. (View Highlight)
I described this change as splitting out our operational reports from our analytical reports. (View Highlight)
Looking back at it, the difference was not actually operational vs analytical, but that these reports were built with entities at their heart instead of a specific use case, so downstream users could build for many more use cases without our involvement (View Highlight)