How to configure VSCode and AI assistants for productive MDDE development How to configure VSCode and AI assistants for productive MDDE development Data engineers juggle multiple tools daily: SQL editors, YAML validators, Python IDEs, Git clients, documentation systems. Each tool works in isolation, forcing context switches that kill productivity. When working with Metadata-Driven Data Engineering (MDDE), this fragmentation becomes acute. You’re constantly moving between: Model definitions (YAML/MDDE files) Generated SQL (DDL, DML, quality checks) Metadata...

Bridging Code-First and Metadata-First Approaches For many teams, dbt is the modern data stack. It provides: Clean SQL-based transformations Dependency graphs Tests and documentation Developer-friendly workflows It has raised the quality bar across the industry. So if dbt works — why introduce something like MDDE? The answer is not replacement. It’s enrichment. dbt is unapologetically code-first. Models are defined as SQL files. Structure is inferred. Documentation and tests are attached via YAML. It works beautifully...

Where Data Modelers and Data Engineers Live Under One Roof “VS Code is the house. AI is the building crew you hire to help construct the (data)house.” In Part 1, we saw how structure (ERD) and movement (DAG) finally said “I do.” In Part 2, we revisited how this marriage was already modeled at De Volksbank / ASN — years before modern metadata platforms were born. Now, it’s time to build the modern home for that marriage — a single environment where...

💡 Why modern metadata-driven teams no longer draw diagrams — they generate them. In classic data modeling, diagrams were the main artifact — we used tools like PowerDesigner or ERwin to draw boxes and lines, define relationships, and label attributes. The visuals were the models. Today, that relationship has flipped. In metadata-driven environments, the model comes first, and the diagram is a view — automatically generated from the underlying metadata. This shift — from drawing to generating — may...