GOOD STRATEGY REBELLION

Tag: technology

  • DATA WORLD: The Risks of Using Databricks for Data Warehousing

    DATA WORLD: The Risks of Using Databricks for Data Warehousing

    Get that Databricks Out of My Face!

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Madrid, Monday 9th February 2026

    You need not loathe Databricks outright. It is perfectly defensible if you do. This is particularly true when your principal objective is classical data warehousing. This includes structured BI reporting, dependable SQL analytics, and a governed single source of truth for business metrics. It also entails semantic clarity and predictable costs for read-heavy workloads.

    There are solid, well-trodden reasons for that caveat. Many experienced data warehousing practitioners see Databricks as an awkward or even risky primary platform for traditional warehousing. This view is shared by some of the field’s foundational figures. The concern is not ideological. It is architectural. When used as a warehouse, Databricks often reproduces exactly the pathologies criticised in enterprise data programs. These include unnecessary complexity, misdirected effort, and the perennial executive question, “Which number should I trust?”

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  • DATA WORLD: Big Data With Bigger Smiles – The Chef’s Choice – 2026/01/28

    DATA WORLD: Big Data With Bigger Smiles – The Chef’s Choice – 2026/01/28

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid 28th January 2026

    I would like to introduce you to a pragmatic approach to Big Data and Big Data Analytics. It is real-world focused and business-centric. This is the best approach to Big Data you are ever likely to find. Yet, I am still significantly understating the magnificent utility. It is also timely and has all the pertinent facets of the approach.

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  • CEO BRIEFING: Agile at Scale is Bullshit by Design – Remastered and Revisited – 2026/01/27

    CEO BRIEFING: Agile at Scale is Bullshit by Design – Remastered and Revisited – 2026/01/27

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Bruxelles, 28th May 2019

    To begin at the beginning

    To paraphrase the great Bob Hoffman. Just when you feared that Agile evangelists might produce even more nonsense, they surprise you. What do they do? Exceed expectations.

    And how did they do that? Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Agile at Scale. It comes with all the miscellaneous, spiced-up, and vainglorious crap-on-the-side that accompanies it.

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  • CEO BRIEFING: What Every CEO Needs to Know About Big Data – Revisited – 2026/01/26

    CEO BRIEFING: What Every CEO Needs to Know About Big Data – Revisited – 2026/01/26

    Martyn Richard Jones

    New York City, 18th January 2017

    OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
    Blue sky for professional data architecture and management

    Scope

    I’ll make this short, sweetish and to the point.

    These are the arguments that CEOs need to know about Big Data.

    It was written for CEOs and those who provide independent advice to CEOs.

    If you are someone who wants to be prepared for CEOs who are armed with the realities of Big Data, then maybe this is for you too.

    Point One: Big Data is bullshit

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  • DATA WORLD: Understanding the Data Warehouse Dilemma – 2026/02/07

    DATA WORLD: Understanding the Data Warehouse Dilemma – 2026/02/07

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Madrid, Saturday 7th February 2026

    Books from Martyn Rhisiart Jones https://www.amazon.es/stores/author/B086K5B97Y

    What to say?

    I was reading an article. It was written by Jeff Wilts and recommended by Bill Inmon. I got to this statement: “Teradata is a full-featured enterprise data warehouse.”  For me, it went further downhill from there.

    But this was the coup de grace: “Databricks is a unified data platform that can behave like a data warehouse.” 

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  • DATA WORLD: Big data’s unvirtuous circus and twelve v-words – Refresh – 2026/02/05

    DATA WORLD: Big data’s unvirtuous circus and twelve v-words – Refresh – 2026/02/05

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Bonn, Germany, 2014

    Many people come up to me in the street and ask me what big-data is all about. I have experienced this numerous times before. I am sure it might just happen to you as well. I know sort of thing, I read the big-data tea leaves. Nothing gets past me.

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  • MASTERCLASS: Ask the Data, Information and Knowledge Expert

    MASTERCLASS: Ask the Data, Information and Knowledge Expert

    Masterclass: Here’s Martyn!

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones and the Goodstrat editorial team, Madrid, 3rd February 2026

    Introduction

    The following is the redacted transcript of a conversation between the distinguished Sir Afilonius Rex of Cambriano Energy and the cordial Martyn Rhisiart Jones of goodstrat.com.

    The informal session took place before an invited audience at the Welsh Academy’s alternative summer conference of July 2023 and featured a lively question-and-answer session with audience input.

    According to our reliable sources, “The BBC, RTE and RTVE broadcast the session.”

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  • CEO BRIEFING: The Truth Behind AI Hype in 2026 – 2026/01/22

    CEO BRIEFING: The Truth Behind AI Hype in 2026 – 2026/01/22

    New IT Bullshit for Old

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Madrid, Wednesday 21 January 2026

    In early 2026 the technology industry is once again telling big confident stories about its own future. These stories dominate earnings calls conference stages and investor decks. They sound transformative urgent and inevitable. Yet when examined closely many of them rest on fragile foundations and selective evidence rather than operational reality.

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  • CEO BRIEFING: The Return of AI Bolloxology: Why It Means Jack

    CEO BRIEFING: The Return of AI Bolloxology: Why It Means Jack

    IS DUCKOLOGY UTTER BOLLOX?

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Madrid, Tuesday 20th January 2026

    Read my absolutely fabulous books: http://www.goodstrat.com/books

    For most of its life in information technology, bolloxology has carried the faint smell of intellectual fart-like embarrassment. Too academic for product teams. Too rigid for startups. Too slow for an industry trained to ship first and rationalise later. Too smelly. It promised machines that could understand the world, and delivered, instead, a generation of beautiful bullshit diagrams and very little working software.

    By 2026, that judgement looks increasingly wrong. Not because bolloxology suddenly got better, but because everything else did, and in doing so, exposed a missing layer in modern computing: meaning.

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  • The Comeback of Ontology in AI: Why It Matters – 2026/01/21

    The Comeback of Ontology in AI: Why It Matters – 2026/01/21

    IS ONTOLOGY UTTER BOLLOX?

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Madrid, Tuesday 20th January 2026

    Read my absolutely fabulous books: http://www.goodstrat.com/books

    Ontology Didn’t Fail. The World Just Wasn’t Ready.

    For most of its life in information technology, ontology has carried the faint smell of intellectual embarrassment. Too academic for product teams. Too rigid for startups. Too slow for an industry trained to ship first and rationalise later. It promised machines that could understand the world—and delivered, instead, a generation of beautiful diagrams and very little working software.

    By 2026, that judgement looks increasingly wrong. Not because ontology suddenly got better, but because everything else did—and in doing so, exposed a missing layer in modern computing: meaning.

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  • DATA WORLD: The Truth About Data Lakehouses: Hype vs. Reality – 2026/01/18

    DATA WORLD: The Truth About Data Lakehouses: Hype vs. Reality – 2026/01/18

    Top Last 100 Articles Here <— Click

    Hype and Misleading Claims Surrounding Data Lakehouses

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Bandoxa, 17th January 2026

    Read my absolutely fabulous books: http://www.goodstrat.com/books

    Let’s cut through the noise.

    You’ve probably heard the pitch: A data lakehouse is the elegant hybrid. It finally gives you the best of both worlds.

    • The low-cost, massively scalable, schema-on-read flexibility of a classic data lake (perfect for ingesting raw, unstructured, petabyte-scale chaos).
    • The structured querying speed, ACID transactions, governance, and reliable performance of a traditional data warehouse.
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  • The Rise of Agentic AI in 2026 – 2026/01/15

    The Rise of Agentic AI in 2026 – 2026/01/15

    Is Agent Orange Agentic AI?

    Sir Afilonius Rex and Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Read my absolutely fabulous books: http://www.goodstrat.com/books

    Paris, Thursday 15th January 2026

    Strap in, you beautiful, trusting little optimist. We’re about to crank the dial so far past irony that it transforms into existential despair. It comes with a side of eye-roll. Here’s your precious 2026 AI agent prophecy. It is now properly marinated in contempt. It is served with a garnish of pure, seething mockery.

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  • DATA WORLD: Big Data: The Art of Bullshit – 2026

    DATA WORLD: Big Data: The Art of Bullshit – 2026

    Bertxin Galestara and Sir Afilonius Rex,  based on an  opinion piece written by Marty Rhisiart Jones

    Mountain View, 19th January 2017 – Bandoxa Thursday 15th January, 2026

    “I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bullshit.” – Mel Brooks

    If you enjoy this piece or find it useful, then please consider joining The Big Data Contrarians on LinkedIn. (more…)

  • Top AI Red Flags to Watch – 2026

    Top AI Red Flags to Watch – 2026

    AI’s Red Flags – His Master’s Voice

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Bandoxa, Tuesday 13th January 2026

    Read my absolutely fabulous books: http://www.goodstrat.com/books

    As we settle into 2026, artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic promise. It is embedded infrastructure. It powers everything from enterprise workflows and personal assistants to autonomous agents that act on our behalf. Yet with greater capability comes greater exposure. The biggest red flags this year are not hypothetical doomsday scenarios. They are already materialising in boardrooms. They are visible in cybersecurity dashboards, consumer wallets, and regulatory filings. Here are the most pressing warning signs to watch in 2026. These are drawn from industry reports. They originate from expert predictions. Emerging incident patterns also highlight them.

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  • Navigating Data Warehousing’s Professional Crisis – 2026

    Navigating Data Warehousing’s Professional Crisis – 2026

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Read my absolutely fabulous books: http://www.goodstrat.com/books
     
    A quiet disquiet has settled over the once-confident corridors of enterprise data. What was, not so long ago, regarded as a rigorous and rather specialised craft, data warehousing and business intelligence, now frequently presents itself in a more casual, even improvisational guise. A growing number of senior executives, technology directors and indeed practitioners themselves confess to a mounting discomfort with the quality, and at times the sheer quantity, of self-proclaimed experts who populate the field.
     

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  • The GigaOm Data Lake Report

    The GigaOm Data Lake Report

    Nonsense on parade

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Madrid, Tuesday 13th January 2026

    This GigaOm report is a classic vendor-sponsored benchmark. Fivetran picked the competitors and shaped the test scope. GigaOm (as explicitly disclosed) executed it “as-is” with “compatible configurations subject to judgment.” It’s marketing material presented as independent research. It has several structural weaknesses. These weaknesses make the 77–95% cost savings claim highly misleading for most real organisations.

    1. It only measures ingestion compute, not true TCO.

    The report repeatedly calls itself a “TCO report,” but it explicitly excludes:

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  • Top 12 AI Grifters, Charlatans & Rogues to Avoid in 2026 – 2026/01/14

    Top 12 AI Grifters, Charlatans & Rogues to Avoid in 2026 – 2026/01/14

    The Skunkworks Collective – Martyn, Alba, Afi, Lila, and Coco

    Madrid, Wednesday 14th January 2026

    Right, listen. If you’ve ever sat through one of those AI conferences, you know the ones. Some bloke in a black polo neck stands on stage. He’s clearly never met a mirror he didn’t like. He says, “We’re on the cusp of AGI.” It sounds as if he’s just invented gravity. Then you’ll know the particular flavour of despair I’m talking about.

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  • 10 AI Agents Every Business Leader Needs To Steer Clear of in 2026 – 2026/01/13

    10 AI Agents Every Business Leader Needs To Steer Clear of in 2026 – 2026/01/13

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Madrid, Tuesday 13th January 2026

    As we venture further into 2026, the landscape of enterprise artificial intelligence has undergone a subtle but profound shift. The once-dazzling promise of autonomous AI agents has matured into something more prosaic. These self-directed digital entities can orchestrate tasks from customer engagement to complex data integration. Yet, they are no less pervasive. They are no longer novelties confined to experimental labs; they inhabit boardrooms, back offices and supply chains alike.

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  • Justifying Business Data Requirements – 2026/01/11

    Justifying Business Data Requirements – 2026/01/11

    Justify Your Data Needs

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Oxford University, Sunday 11th January 2026

    Should All Business Data Requirements Be Justified in Business Terms?

    A Pseudo-Debate

    Motion: All business data requirements must be justified in business terms. Potential business utility should be a deciding factor in whether they are fulfilled.

    For the Motion: Sir Afilonius Rex
    Against the Motion: Martyn Rhisiart Jones

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  • A Brief History of Data Warehousing – 2026/01/07 – Includes Podcast

    A Brief History of Data Warehousing – 2026/01/07 – Includes Podcast

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Madrid, 7th January 2026

    The origins of data warehousing are often pinned to the late 1980s, when the term “business data warehouse” first appeared in an influential IBM Systems Journal article by researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy. I was based in Birmingham at that time, and I also wrote a similar foundational document on Information Centres for Sperry Univac.

    Yet, as with many technological breakthroughs, the story is far richer and older than the conventional narrative suggests. The foundational components of what we now recognise as a data warehouse were quietly taking shape as early as the 1960s, driven by the need to organise, integrate, and analyse growing volumes of business information in an era of punch cards, magnetic tape, and the first mainframes.

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  • BERNIE MARR BALLS: Nine Absurd AI Use Cases We Don’t Need

    BERNIE MARR BALLS: Nine Absurd AI Use Cases We Don’t Need

    Am I Funny, Yet?

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Madrid, Saturday 3rd January 2026

    Nine things that really, really shouldn’t be use cases for AI. Delivered by slowly dismantling a bad idea like it’s a poorly constructed IKEA wardrobe. Rant about bourgeois nonsense with surreal fury. Explain why the whole thing is politically ridiculous. Just stare at the absurdity until it cracks. This is like Marnie Listicle Barr on crack.

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  • Weaving the Dragon’s Data: A Welsh-Inspired Tale for Enterprise Architects in the New Year – 2026/01/01

    Weaving the Dragon’s Data: A Welsh-Inspired Tale for Enterprise Architects in the New Year – 2026/01/01

    Martyn Muses – 2026/01/01

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Location, 22nd December 2025

    Weaving the Dragon’s Data: A Welsh-Inspired Tale for Enterprise Architects in the New Year – 2026/01/01

    The calendar turns to a fresh page in this crisp January of 2026. We, enterprise data and information architects, stand at a new threshold. Another year welcomes us, brimming with digital transformations. Data lakes swell like the River Taff after a storm. Information architectures evolve like the ancient mountain tops of Snowdonia. But amidst the algorithms and schemas, let’s pause for a moment of whimsy. What if we drew inspiration from the misty realms of Welsh myths and legends? Wales, that land of dragons and bards, offers a tapestry of stories. These stories mirror our quests: taming chaotic data into structured wisdom. They are about preserving cultural legacies in vast repositories. They ignite innovation from the sparks of history. In this Happy New Year ode, we’ll begin a narrative journey through Welsh lore. It is infused with the spirits of its iconic figures. Dylan Thomas, Dannie Abse, Richard Burton, Shirley Bassey, Paul Robeson, and Gwynfor Evans are part of this infusion. These spirits illuminate the art of data stewardship.

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  • Future Data Trends: Insights for 2026 Leadership

    Future Data Trends: Insights for 2026 Leadership

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Segovia, 20th December 2025

    Top 5 Trends Shaping the Future of Data, Analytics, and AI Leadership in 2026

    I’ve had the privilege of leading a groundbreaking global study in partnership with a strategic client. During this study, I spoke with many key Chief Data Officers (CDOs). I also engaged with Chief Data & Analytics Officers (CDAOs) and AI executives across industries and geographies. The insights reveal how organisations are changing their data and AI strategies. They aim to drive real business value in an increasingly complex world.

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  • העידן החדש של מחסום הנתונים: מהפכה טכנולוגית

    העידן החדש של מחסום הנתונים: מהפכה טכנולוגית

    Martyn Rhisiart Jones

    Segovia, 21st December 2025

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