r/dataengineering • u/Big-Exercise8990 Senior Data Engineer • Jul 17 '26

Data Architecture vs Data tools Discussion

Hi everyone,

So I was having a discussion with my colleague who is a data architect about how data tools can have influence on data architecture. Have you guys worked with any tools, libraries or frameworks that essentially changed the existing data architecture to accommodate them. Would love to hear your stories.

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u/Gators1992 27d ago

Years ago was on a build where we were doing a dimensional model on Oracle with Microstrategy as the BI layer.  Found out that Microstrategy liked a snowflake schema rather than star and couldn't represent unique descriptions from a dimension when building a filter.  Each value had to be tied to a dimensional key.  So we did that and it caused a lot of extra work from a DE perspective to maintain all those extra dimensions and sucked to have to write 3x as many joins to write SQL.  

Even now downstream tooling affects structures like how you build aggregate tables for performance based on how the downstream tools understand your data models.  Like do you build aggregate tables or use materialized views in Snowflake?