Launch HN: Narrator (YC S19) – a data modeling platform built on a single table
Hard to imagine a worse idea.<p>The problem in data warehousing is not the <i>structure</i>, it&#x27;s the <i>definitions</i>. It doesn&#x27;t matter one tiny little bit whether you store your data in a fact&#x2F;dimension star schema, a normalized OLTP-style schema, arbitrary aggregate&#x2F;rollup tables, or this one-table monstrosity you&#x27;ve constructed. You still have to do the work of determining <i>what the data means</i>.<p>This isn&#x27;t 50% of the work of building a data warehouse. It&#x27;s 99% of the work.<p>This &quot;Activity Stream&quot; concept has some merit but most data sources can&#x27;t support it. Much to my eternal frustration, most systems only store current state, and have no concept of history or events. You can&#x27;t extract &quot;activities&quot; from a data system that doesn&#x27;t record them.<p>Still, maybe I&#x27;m wrong and your idea is great. The market will reject it.<p>Star schema modeling is woven into the very fabric of the data warehousing profession. We use it everywhere, whether it&#x27;s appropriate or not (and it is often not appropriate). It&#x27;s what <i>all</i> the BI tools support. It&#x27;s what analysts know how to write queries against. Your thing may be cool and all but no one knows how to use it.<p>One last thing:
&quot;Numbers would always match (single source of truth)...&quot;<p>Not even close. This belies just massive ignorance of how analytics actually work. Let&#x27;s say I have a data point that says the total amount of order #123 is $42.00. Ok... does that include shipping? Sales tax? Oh it does, and finance cares about that, so now I need to decompose that into 34.95 + 5.00 + 2.05 and label appropriately. Now Bob&#x27;s report can sum the item total (no shipping, no taxes) and Alice&#x27;s report can include shipping but not taxes, and Jimmy&#x27;s report can sum the total, and now your wonderful &quot;single source of truth&quot; story goes in the toilet. Because &quot;$42.00&quot; isn&#x27;t <i>truth</i> it&#x27;s just a <i>value</i>. What turns it into truth is <i>definition</i> and <i>consensus</i>, which are social problems, not technical problems.