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Thijs Cobben – Data Alchemist

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Free edition · e-book

History of Data

From Cave Paintings to Lakehouses — Forty Years of Patterns

Every era shows the same loop closing: an economic pressure forces a technical move, and the technical move unlocks a new economic regime — which produces the pressure that forces the next. Recognise the pattern, and you can see where your own data platform is heading.

ForewordFull table of contentsChapter 1About the author
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What you get

Four parts, free to read

The free edition is the opening of the book: enough to judge whether the lens works for you. The rest follows chapter by chapter as I finish them.

i

Foreword

A lighthouse code off the coast of Brittany, Ackoff’s pyramid, and why technology alone never changed the world — the spread of the ability to read it did.

ii

Table of contents

The whole route at a glance: from Sumerian tablets and the Roman census to Codd, the warehouse, the spam years and the lakehouse.

1

Chapter 1

From the Origin of Language to the Birth of Data. A 47,000-year opening on the question we almost never ask: what is data, exactly?

iii

About the author

Forty years of databases, from an illegal ZX Spectrum games ‘company’ at twelve to medallion lakehouses — and a Dutch courtroom in between.

A taste of chapter 1

From the Origin of Language to the Birth of Data

Before we begin a 47,000-year journey through the history of data, it is worth pausing on a question we almost never ask: what is data, exactly?Chapter 1 · about 13 minutes’ reading
  • The long silence — a million years of identical hand-axes, and why you cannot improve a tool you cannot talk about.
  • Where the meaning lives — datum, ‘that which is given’: why meaning is never in the data, and what Ackoff’s pyramid asks of us.
  • War story — the youngest of six, and what a Sumerian tablet house has to do with it.
  • Translation to today — a medallion lakehouse, a churn figure of 4.02%, and Johnny from Sales.
  • Sit with this — findability, trust, meaning, impact: which one has nobody noticed yet?
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The full journey

Table of contents

Gold means it is in the free edition. The other chapters are in progress and appear as I finish them.

—
Foreword
Free
1
From the Origin of Language to the Birth of Data
Free
2
The First Tablets Sumer, the Edubba, and the Birth of the Scribe
In progress
3
Rome Industrialising the Census
In progress
4
Meanwhile, in China and the Andes
In progress
5
The House of Wisdom and the Curated Word
In progress
 
Interlude: Meanwhile in Medieval Europe The Bible as Data Product
In progress
6
Print, Ships, and the First Mass Data
In progress
 
Interlude: The Birth of a Method Three Centuries of Scientific Discovery
In progress
7
The Wires Before the Web
In progress
8
Punched Cards to Mainframes When the State Got a Memory
In progress
9
The Relational Decade Codd, SQL, and the Reporting Hangover
In progress
10
Enter the Warehouse OLAP, BI, and the Department That Owns the Truth
In progress
11
The Spam Years and the Birth of Modern Governance
In progress
12
The Lakehouse and the Age of AI
In progress
 
Epilogue Why I Wrote This
In progress
—
About the Author
Free

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