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CryspIQ - my first thoughts

· 3 min read
Phlippie Smit
Phlippie Smit
CryspIQ Technical Owner

"We're building something amazing"​

When I spoke to Vaughan a couple of years ago he told me that Dan and he was building something amazing. He spoke about a data model that can take in any type of data and report on it.

Having worked in large corporate and government data warehouse environments, I was naturally sceptical as you may be. I also fiddled with universal data models when I was studying at university, so the project and product had my attention.

I really wanted to see it in action and after spending some time on the East Coast in another BI role and trying my hand as an IT Manager, I joined the CryspIQ team.

My first thoughts​

The first few months were hard - very hard. I had to let go of the Data Warehousing knowledge ingrained in my mind from having worked with both Kimball and Inmon implementations. I kept trying to use the traditional ways, and my mind refused to make the shift to what CryspIQ was.

After some late nights and doing a few proof of concepts to potential clients, things started making sense - you could say the penny eventually dropped. I saw new opportunities and how CryspIQ simplifies the end to end traditional data warehouse process.

And that was not where it stopped, the services used offered new, exciting ways of managing data quality whilst loading data. The services also offered ways to lookup data against external data sources and API's.

Further to this CryspIQ also had the ability to generate exceptions on the exact row of source data that refused to load because of a data issue, and it pointed me to the column and the reason for the data not loading. Gone were the days of working hours to figure out why a pesky multi-gigbyte flat file wouldn't load.

We did a lot of development, testing, and prototyping in 2023, really throwing every data scenario we could think of at CryspIQ. It handled every scenario well (after thinking it through with my new-found understanding of CryspIQ).

My thoughts now​

CryspIQ is not only a technology, it is also a methodolgy. The potential is huge for businesses to speed up access to insights from to the ever growing mountain of data that is generated every day.

I'm extremely excited about what 2024 will bring, and particularly about how we will use AI to make thing even easier for people to interact with their data.