John, Author at Driftwave

Bringing CI/CD Best Practices into Modern BI Workflows

In the world of software development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) have become essential pillars of delivering high-quality, reliable software quickly and safely. But as business intelligence (BI) and analytics evolve, it’s time for BI teams to adopt these same best practices to unlock faster insights, improved data quality, and more confidence in their […]

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When to Use Lightdash Parameters vs Filters

Lightdash / John

Lightdash gives you two powerful ways to control what data your users see: filters and parameters.On the surface, they can look very similar. Both can narrow down results and help people focus on the right slice of data. But parameters aren’t just another kind of filter. They unlock flexibility, reusability, and customisation that filters alone

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How Storing Dashboards as Code Increases Trust in Your Data Team

Lightdash / John

I hate chasing down why that dashboard looks off. You hate chasing down why that dashboard looks off. It always starts the same way: a stakeholder pings with a screenshot, something looks broken, and you find yourself deep in someone else’s query trying to track down what changed, when, and why. Meanwhile, trust in your

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dbt Fusion: What It Means for Data Teams

Business Intelligence / John

With the release of dbt Fusion, dbt Labs has introduced a new engine that promises significant performance improvements and advanced capabilities over the familiar dbt Core. Fusion is more than just a technical upgrade: it represents a fundamental shift in how dbt is developed, distributed, and licensed. In this post, we break down the pros

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Avoiding Config Warnings while Updating Your dbt Project to v1.1

Business Intelligence / John

With the recent release of dbt 1.1, users may start to see warnings like this: Warning: while parsing model config: Ignore unexpected key “meta” dbt 1.1 introduces a subtle but important shift in how configuration properties are structured for sources, models, and other resources. What’s Changed? Historically, dbt allowed you to set properties like freshness,

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Creating Custom Charts in Lightdash with Vega-Lite

Lightdash / John

Lightdash now offers Custom Charts, enabling more advanced and customizable visualizations using the powerful Vega-Lite library. This unlocks the potential to go beyond standard chart types, letting you create visualizations like heatmaps, box plots, maps, and more. What is Vega-Lite? Vega-Lite is a high-level grammar of interactive graphics, built on top of the lower-level Vega

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Metabase Adds Smarter Expressions and Table Upgrades

Metabase / John

Metabase 54 just dropped, and it’s a big one. Many of the most impactful improvements are part of the open-source edition, meaning you get them automatically with your Driftwave-hosted instance. If you manage your own self-hosted instance, Metabase provides an upgrade guide here. Here’s what you can now do (or do better) with Metabase 54:

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Breaking Free from Vendor Lock-In

Business Intelligence / John

For growth-stage companies, data-driven decision-making is a critical pillar of success. As teams scale, they need fast, reliable, and flexible access to insights across the business. But many organizations find themselves trapped by the very tools they rely on to deliver those insights. This is the story of one such company and how they broke

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Why a Clear Semantic Layer is Essential for Analytics

Business Intelligence / John

A well-defined semantic layer is the foundation of effective business intelligence (BI). By ensuring consistent data definitions and organized metrics, you empower teams to extract insights with clarity and precision. While ‘semantic layer’ was a buzzword a few years back, this blog explores why a clear semantic layer is still critical and how to implement

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Validate dbt Changes Before Merging

Lightdash / John

Have you ever hit “merge” on a dbt pull request and just hope it doesn’t break everything downstream? Yeah, us too. That slight internal panic—“please don’t wreck any dashboards”—is all too familiar. Now there’s a much better way to avoid dashboard chaos: Preview Projects from GitHub Branches. This capability fundamentally changes how you can develop

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Author name: John