My name is Brian Jarrett and I’m a data warehouse architect. This is my blog where I talk about all things data and data warehousing.

These days, they just call me a data architect, but my wheelhouse is data warehousing. I’ve been working professionally with data since I got into IT in late 2000. I ended up in data warehousing by a coin toss, really. After my first IT job interview they asked me to choose a position…working on one of the company’s homegrown apps or the data warehouse. I had no idea what to choose, but I thought warehousing sounded like something cool, so I chose it.

More than twenty years later, I’m still doing data warehousing. It’s changed shape over the years, with new technologies, cheap storage, and increased processing power, but at its core it’s still all just data management.

I started out hand-coding ETL in an existing data warehouse in Informix 4GL. Then I moved to coding in Perl, then several ETL tools. These days I do most of my ETL in T-SQL. I’ve used all kinds of databases over the years, including all the big players in the space.

I learned how to build semantic layers. I also picked up some experience with reporting tools along the way.

These days, I mostly work as a data architect, although I still do a lot of ETL and semantic layer work. I modeled my first data “mart” back in 2004. In 2005 I built a data warehouse for a printing company. In 2008 I went to work for a cable company and spent nearly nine years designing and building out their large-scale enterprise data warehouse.

In 2017 I built an entire data platform for a credit card processing company. This system included not only an EDW, but also an automated, config-driven, near-real time ODS layer, an entire chunk of company data I’d never concerned myself with before. The role of the data architect has evolved now to encompass all kinds of data, even that  formerly outside of the monolithic data warehouse.

As I write this I’m in a state of transition; after five years with the credit card processing company, I’ve moved on to become the senior data architect for a different company. They’re at the beginning of their digital transformation journey, so it’s one of those green field opportunities that I love so much. I’ll be “on the ground”, heading up the development and helping steer the direction of the new platform using 100% cloud-native tools.

So have a look around the site. More content is forthcoming. Stay tuned.