The amount of data that companies generate and use these days has grown exponentially over the last few years. And as companies use more and more data to generate insights and make business decisions – the demands on Business Intelligence (BI) teams and data analysts particularly, grow as well. 

To address this growing demand for insights, new technologies and methodologies have developed over the last few years: 

• Cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, Redshift and BigQuery are now used everywhere, giving organizations scalable data storage and querying infrastructure, easily and cost-effectively.  
• Cheaper, scalable computing resources to query data have, in-turn, helped organizations shift from ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) to ELT (Extract, Load, Transform), which make it possible to transform data in a much more flexible and easy manner.

Now that data can be transformed on top of the data warehouse easily, using SQL to code these transformations and models makes complete sense. It empowers data analysts to use their existing skills to expedite analysis and take on a more central role in the data organization while increasing efficiency and flexibility for the company.

But with great power comes great responsibility, as the saying goes… how can we ensure that BI teams have the right tools and methodologies to enable them to take advantage of this shift in the optimal way? 

Montara’s cloud-native BI platform enables data analysts and BI teams to take control over the full data pipeline while providing them with the power to do so confidently:

Automatic orchestration

In Montara, data analysts focus on writing transformation code and modeling data, not on managing data pipelines. Montara automatically infers and creates the data pipeline from the SQL queries.

Versioning support

Montara maintains versions of the transformation code and data pipeline automatically, enabling data analysts to compare versions and even revert to older versions of the code.

Testing and data validation

Data analysts can configure data validation rules for models and Montara will automatically generate testing code and run these tests when executing the data pipeline, making sure that bad data doesn’t enter your data warehouse.

Data lineage and report-level lineage

Montara provides the data lineage for every model and report so that data analysts can be confident they understand the potential impact of every change they make on the rest of the data pipeline as well as dashboards and reports.

Automatic documentation

To facilitate collaboration and increase efficiency, Montara automatically generates documentation for every model. Data analysts can share this documentation with stakeholders in the organization so they can easily work with the data on their own.

Data analysts are now empowered to lead the way and own data transformation end-to-end. Power to the data analyst!