Vendors rebrand technical concepts with new names: dbt calls SQL queries "models," Databricks calls its product a "catalog," and there's a "Genie ontology" created without ontologists. Once vendors popularize these terms, the original meanings drift away, making it hard to find what things actually are.
Chapters
which is exactly what we said when dbt came up with the idea that the data model equals a SQL query, basically. So I have personally been writing several rants about, you know, how I hate the fact that dbt started calling queries models. And I also hate the fact that Databricks started calling Unity a catalog, but that's another topic. But, you know, there is some of that, and I agree there is the risk of doing, you know, running into the same mistakes that as data modelers did back then. It's also, I think, inevitable because of the vendor washing that, uh, when Databricks says that Genie ontology is an ontology, then okay, you know, there's nothing you can do anymore. They didn't ask an ontologist, they just built it and now engineers will be using it and they will be talking about ontologies to each other and the terms just get out there and they morph into something completely different. You can't help that. And what we can do, I think, is to keep the discussion going so that at least there's a chance for someone who's interested in this, this sort of backgrounds and these concepts themselves and what do these methods mean, how they actually work, that this content for that actually exists somewhere, that you can actually run into it.
