Updated May 15, 2026
The Semantic Wars Are Here. Google, You’re Next.Microsoft started a semantic war with Databricks. The next front is AI. Google customers need a semantic strategy to stay free on both. Microsoft just killed the connector that let Power BI read Databricks’ business metrics. This was the opening…
Updated May 13, 2026
Google Paid $2.6 Billion to Prove AtScale Right About SemanticsThe Looker rename is news. The bigger story is what it means for the semantic layer in the AI era. Google is renaming Looker Studio back to Data Studio. The seemingly simple move sends a big signal: the semantic layer…
Updated May 11, 2026
Snowflake, Databricks, AtScale, and Omni, on the same stage, on purposeThe OSI panel airs at the Semantic Layer Summit. Here's what I'm hoping shakes loose. Snowflake and Databricks don't usually sit at the same table. They compete for the same workloads, the same logos, the same line items in the…
Updated May 7, 2026
Inside the Trillion-Dollar AI Problem: Context and ComputeSnowflake, Tableau, and BlackRock named the symptom. Jeremy Arendt at Blue Yonder is showing operators what it actually costs. Jeremy Arendt runs analytics engineering at Blue Yonder, the supply chain platform behind a meaningful slice of the world's trucks, warehouses,…
Updated May 4, 2026
Microsoft Held Databricks Customers Hostage. Customers Paid the Ransom. Freedom Ends It.Microsoft made a small, deliberate change to the Power BI connector for Azure Databricks (release notes). The change looks technical, but it's really a move to seize control of the semantic layer, where your company defines what revenue, customer, and…
Updated May 4, 2026
Google Just Made Iceberg the Format Foundation of Compute. Make Sure Your Semantics Are Ready to Travel.What Google announced at Cloud Next wasn't an upgrade. It was a starting gun. Google announced a cross-cloud lakehouse standardized on Apache Iceberg. Not BigQuery's tables. Not a Google format. Iceberg. Open. Sitting in object storage you own. Readable by…
Updated April 30, 2026
BI Tools Keep Trying to Own Your Semantic LayerEvery decade, someone reinvents the BI-embedded model. Every decade, customers end up migrating off it. The semantic layer is the context layer for AI, and putting it inside one BI tool was the original sin. Last week, Omni raised a…
Updated April 29, 2026
The Math Behind the AnswerI'm hosting a session on May 20. Here's what we'll dig into. Agentic AI looks impressive in a demo, until you ask it a question your CFO actually cares about. If an AI agent can't reliably answer “What was net…
Updated April 28, 2026
Why I Stepped Off the Board and Joined AtScale as CMSOWhat I saw from the board, and why it matters if you’re betting your career on AI. When I joined AtScale’s board, I saw what looked like a best-in-class semantic layer: a way to make analytics faster, more consistent, and…
Updated April 27, 2026
3 Takeaways from Google Cloud Next 2026Google Cloud Next 2026 wrapped up this week at Mandalay Bay, and I’ve got thoughts. Some of them are even about the announcements. But let’s start with the elephant, or rather, the 40,000 people crammed into a venue built for…
