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rdco article analytics canon

Tue Dec 29 2020 19:00:00 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time) ·article ·status: draft ·source: notion ·by Mr. Ben / Ray Data Co

Analytics Canon

Core Argument

There are definitive sources in every field. The founder wanted to write one for the Analytics space. Kimball comes to mind. There are also several related ideas that are not consolidated to one source:

Why It Matters

This is the earliest article in the batch (late 2020) and reveals the founder’s ambition: to create a canonical reference for analytics-engineering. The Kimball reference is significant — Ralph Kimball’s dimensional modeling was the gold standard for data warehousing, but by 2020 the modern data stack was evolving past some of those patterns. The founder saw a gap: no single source consolidated the core concepts a modern analytics practitioner needs to know.

This ambition — to build a definitive reference — eventually evolved into the Ray Data Co newsletter (Sanity Check) and the broader content strategy. The specific topics listed (OLTP/OLAP, normalization, wide vs. narrow tables) remain foundational concepts in the field.