3.1. Design Loading Patterns

💡 First Principle: Loading patterns determine how data flows from source systems to your analytics platform—like choosing between completely replacing your house's water supply daily versus only refilling what you've used. Full loads are simple but expensive; incremental loads are efficient but require tracking what's changed. The wrong pattern can mean 4-hour jobs that should take 5 minutes, or subtle data quality issues that compound over time.

What breaks without proper loading patterns? Consider a daily sales pipeline that processes 10 million records. A full load takes 4 hours and consumes massive compute. An incremental load of the 50,000 new records takes 5 minutes. But if you implement incremental loading incorrectly—missing updates, double-counting records, or losing deletes—your analytics become untrustworthy.