Data Centre expansion, Databricks copying Clickhouse (?) and Human-in-the-loop workflows #119 w/e 23 Jan 2026

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Jan 26, 2026

If we needed any reminding, this week showcased AI = data centre expansion. Big money, big builds, and governments trying to keep up with the power + planning reality.

Infra constraints become product constraints: where your warehouse runs, how fast you can scale, and what “always-on” reliability actually looks like. APAC and EMEA are trying to join the race (Google investing $15bn in a 100MW data centre India, Vantage expanding), so expect more regional options and more variance in latency, cost, and quotas.

Separately Databricks employees were very happy and excited about their 2027 Sales Kick-off. We’ll be monitoring that announcement surprise closely, but after Clickhouse announced postgres to Clickhouse replication in Clickhouse cloud, you have to feel there is a Neon angle at play.

Orchestra Product Updates

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See Orchestra product updates

Separately..

Alteryx is often one of the more common tools in the analytics stack.

With Orchestra’s new Alteryx integration, you can now trigger and monitor Alteryx jobs directly from your pipelines. This makes it easy to coordinate Alteryx with upstream data ingestion, downstream transformations, and notifications, while keeping everything observable in one place. Alteryx becomes a composable building block in your data platform, not a silo.

January Feature Log

Pipeline Context Propagation — Triggered pipelines can now inherit the parent run context as an input.
Persistent pipeline table sorting — Your pipeline table sort order is now saved per user between sessions. Read more.
Alteryx integration — You can trigger and monitor Alteryx jobs directly from Orchestra pipelines. Docs here.
Richer Slack notifications — Slack Tasks now support Slack Blocks for structured, richer alerts. Check out Slack’s Block Kit Builder.
State-aware savings + programmatic pipeline runs — New scripts help quantify state-aware savings and run pipelines in bulk programmatically. This is huge! Read more.
Control upstream → downstream triggers — Choose which upstream run statuses should trigger downstream pipelines. Docs here.
dbt → Slack alerts: user groups + multi-channel routing — dbt Slack alerts now support @user groups and multi-channel routing. Read more.
Sensor Alerts — Add alerts on failing sensors to catch freshness/dependency issues early. Docs here.

NEW

Easier Git-Connections. You can now just “click a button” and if you’re signed in to your github, it will “just-work”
Usage Page. Head over to Settings —> Usage to see an overview of usage and limits
Approvals / Human-in-the-Loop - Pipelines can now be paused until a human approves the next step. Docs here.