Comments here are geared against picking a technology just because it is brand new and exciting, but sometimes you need to pick up something that is just different from what you or your team know well.
In a project I worked on once, we went with "what we knew" (standard normalized SQL schema) to build an analytics engine. The problem with "going with what you know" is you are likely to badly reinvent well-established patterns. If we had stop for a minute and learnt about star schemas, the project could have ended in a much better shape than it did, and maybe the effective time to release would had been shortened.
BTW, learning "new things" is almost always useful but isn't always precisely exciting. Data warehousing is one example :-).
Becoming proficient with a selected set of technologies is still a good idea, but I'm willing to learn and try new things all the time. First thing I ask myself is if a problem was already solved by someone else, and how.
FWIW, maybe the approach in this case is traditional normalization to get the product out the door. When it becomes untenable, hire someone for whom star schemas are boring.
Put another way, the star schema was known to be a better approach only after the fact. Had your team researched “exotic” (unfamiliar) approaches early on, there is no guarantee you would have landed on a star schema.
Eehhh... I knew about star schemas already, although I've never used one. I do think my cursory knowledge would have caused me to research them when starting a project like that though. Obviously it's all got to be a balance, but I think that the OP is probably a little bit too conservative.
Especially if you are working for other people, we are paid to innovate, and we are paid to learn stuff until it is boring. We've got to stick up for ourselves and learn on the job when we can. One new thing a project sounds great to me.
In a project I worked on once, we went with "what we knew" (standard normalized SQL schema) to build an analytics engine. The problem with "going with what you know" is you are likely to badly reinvent well-established patterns. If we had stop for a minute and learnt about star schemas, the project could have ended in a much better shape than it did, and maybe the effective time to release would had been shortened.
BTW, learning "new things" is almost always useful but isn't always precisely exciting. Data warehousing is one example :-).
Becoming proficient with a selected set of technologies is still a good idea, but I'm willing to learn and try new things all the time. First thing I ask myself is if a problem was already solved by someone else, and how.