Field Notes
Guides and practice notes on data pipeline engineering and ETL reliability from Service Rivercore consultants.
Practical notes from assessments and incident work — written for engineers and analytics leads who own morning warehouse windows.
Why Thai public holidays break more ETL jobs than black Friday spikes
Holiday calendars, upstream file drops, and the quiet ways batch loads undercount when offices close but schedulers keep firing.
Row counts are not vanity metrics
A short case for publishing expected versus loaded row counts as a contract between extractors and warehouse consumers.
Replaying a failed load without doubling the warehouse bill
Bounded backfills, watermark discipline, and why “just rerun everything since Monday” is an expensive comfort phrase.
Who owns the stage that failed at 02:14?
Stage ownership charts turn overnight pages into a known human instead of a group chat archaeology session.