Paulius Alaburda

Paulius Alaburda

Writing about SQL, analytics engineering, DuckDB, and practical data work.

I use this site as a notebook for query patterns, awkward edge cases, data modeling decisions, and the parts of analytics work that are easy to underestimate until they break.

Most of the posts are short, technical, and reusable. They are meant to help with real implementation work, not just describe an idea in the abstract.

My background spans medicine, statistics, energy, biology, and insurance. That mix mostly shows up here as a preference for precise explanations and durable solutions.

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Grouping Overlapping Date Ranges

A step-by-step interval grouping pattern for messy time-based data.

Connect to Fabric Lakehouse using R

Practical notes on connecting familiar analytical tools to a modern platform stack.

Micro-improvement for Window Functions

A compact note on query shape, CTEs, and why small structural changes can matter.

Recent Writing

Manager Notes on one on ones

Data Ramblings 2025 (part 1)

Over time, my head fills up with ideas about the data world. These ideas are usually ramblings about how the current tooling is lacking capabilities. On the one hand…

Micro-improvement for window functions

SQL

A very small change leads to a very small improvement

Qualifying Events Using Recursive CTEs

SQL

And the joys of writing trash SQL code

dbt anti-pattern: using {{ this }} directly in incremental refreshes

If you’re using dbt, the recommended default way to build incremental models looks like this:

dbt anti-pattern: dbt docs runs queries with pivot macros

I can’t for the life of me find this documented but apparently queries that use the pivot or unpivot macros are run so that their compiled code becomes available in the…

Grouping Non-Overlapping Date Ranges

SQL

If you’re a data analyst at a company, it’s VERY likely your company stores some data as a Type 2 slowly-changing dimension. It’s also likely that the way it’s stored may…

Grouping Overlapping Date Ranges

SQL

It’s pretty straightforward to group rows in SQL if their date ranges are consecutive or have fixed gaps.¹ It’s much harder if you want to group overlapping date ranges. I…

Elsewhere