# Data platforms

Essays and notes tagged Data platforms.

- [Not another data lake: context needs curation, not collection](https://muthub.org/writing/not-another-data-lake.md) (Jul 21, 2026): The tempting answer to fragmented context is to pour everything into one place. We tried that with data, and many lakes became swamps. A context layer has to be a curated overlay: retrieval-first, owned, and pointing back to the systems that hold the truth.
- [Agent-first data architecture: five principles](https://muthub.org/writing/agent-first-data-architecture.md) (Sep 30, 2025): Data platforms built for people asking questions will strain when the main consumer is software taking actions. Five principles for designing data platforms where agents are first-class users, and why an open lakehouse helps.
- [Rethinking operational databases for the agent era](https://muthub.org/writing/rethinking-oltp-for-agents.md) (Sep 10, 2025): The lakehouse unified analytics and AI. Bringing operational Postgres into it points toward one governed source of truth for agents.
- [A data engineering agent in practice](https://muthub.org/writing/bigquery-data-engineering-agent.md) (Jul 2, 2025): An experimental agent built pipelines, changed schemas, reverted its own mistakes and generated quality checks from plain language. Self-correction was the part that mattered.
- [Code that validates itself: AI-generated assertions](https://muthub.org/writing/ai-generated-assertions.md) (May 13, 2025): Only about 2.5% of open-source Java repositories use production assertions. LLMs can write them, adding the verification layer AI-written code needs.
- [Governance belongs in the catalog](https://muthub.org/writing/unified-governance-in-the-catalog.md) (Apr 14, 2025): When business meaning, data products and relationships live in one open catalog, agents stop guessing at tables and governance travels with the data.

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Muthukrishnan (Muthu) Bommiah · https://muthub.org · Views are my own and do not represent my employer.