Summary The information about how data is acquired and processed is often as important as the data itself. For this reason metadata management systems are built to track the journey of your business data to aid in analysis, presentation, and compliance. These systems are frequently cumbersome and difficult to maintain, so Octopai was founded to alleviate that burden. In this episode Amnon Drori, CEO and co-founder of Octopai, discusses the business problems he witnessed that led him to starting ...
Apr 23, 2018•40 min•Ep. 28
Summary The rate of change in the data engineering industry is alternately exciting and exhausting. Joe Crobak found his way into the work of data management by accident as so many of us do. After being engrossed with researching the details of distributed systems and big data management for his work he began sharing his findings with friends. This led to his creation of the Hadoop Weekly newsletter, which he recently rebranded as the Data Engineering Weekly newsletter. In this episode he discus...
Apr 15, 2018•44 min•Ep. 27
Summary Managing an analytics project can be difficult due to the number of systems involved and the need to ensure that new information can be delivered quickly and reliably. That challenge can be met by adopting practices and principles from lean manufacturing and agile software development, and the cross-functional collaboration, feedback loops, and focus on automation in the DevOps movement. In this episode Christopher Bergh discusses ways that you can start adding reliability and speed to y...
Apr 08, 2018•55 min•Ep. 26
Summary Cloud computing and ubiquitous virtualization have changed the ways that our applications are built and deployed. This new environment requires a new way of tracking and addressing the security of our systems. ThreatStack is a platform that collects all of the data that your servers generate and monitors for unexpected anomalies in behavior that would indicate a breach and notifies you in near-realtime. In this episode ThreatStack’s director of operations, Pete Cheslock, and senior infra...
Apr 01, 2018•52 min•Ep. 25
Summary The data that is used in financial markets is time oriented and multidimensional, which makes it difficult to manage in either relational or timeseries databases. To make this information more manageable the team at Alapaca built a new data store specifically for retrieving and analyzing data generated by trading markets. In this episode Hitoshi Harada, the CTO of Alapaca, and Christopher Ryan, their lead software engineer, explain their motivation for building MarketStore, how it operat...
Mar 25, 2018•33 min•Ep. 24
Summary Search is a common requirement for applications of all varieties. Elasticsearch was built to make it easy to include search functionality in projects built in any language. From that foundation, the rest of the Elastic Stack has been built, expanding to many more use cases in the proces. In this episode Philipp Krenn describes the various pieces of the stack, how they fit together, and how you can use them in your infrastructure to store, search, and analyze your data. Preamble Hello and...
Mar 19, 2018•51 min•Ep. 23
Summary As software lifecycles move faster, the database needs to be able to keep up. Practices such as version controlled migration scripts and iterative schema evolution provide the necessary mechanisms to ensure that your data layer is as agile as your application. Pramod Sadalage saw the need for these capabilities during the early days of the introduction of modern development practices and co-authored a book to codify a large number of patterns to aid practitioners, and in this episode he ...
Mar 12, 2018•49 min•Ep. 22
Summary Data is an increasingly sought after raw material for business in the modern economy. One of the factors driving this trend is the increase in applications for machine learning and AI which require large quantities of information to work from. As the demand for data becomes more widespread the market for providing it will begin transform the ways that information is collected and shared among and between organizations. With his experience as a chair for the O’Reilly AI conference and an ...
Mar 05, 2018•43 min•Ep. 21
Summary One of the sources of data that often gets overlooked is the systems that we use to run our businesses. This data is not used to directly provide value to customers or understand the functioning of the business, but it is still a critical component of a successful system. Sam Stokes is an engineer at Honeycomb where he helps to build a platform that is able to capture all of the events and context that occur in our production environments and use them to answer all of your questions abou...
Feb 26, 2018•42 min•Ep. 20
Summary The responsibilities of a data scientist and a data engineer often overlap and occasionally come to cross purposes. Despite these challenges it is possible for the two roles to work together effectively and produce valuable business outcomes. In this episode Will McGinnis discusses the opinions that he has gained from experience on how data teams can play to their strengths to the benefit of all. Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infra...
Feb 19, 2018•29 min•Ep. 19
Summary As communications between machines become more commonplace the need to store the generated data in a time-oriented manner increases. The market for timeseries data stores has many contenders, but they are not all built to solve the same problems or to scale in the same manner. In this episode the founders of TimescaleDB, Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman, discuss how Timescale was started, the problems that it solves, and how it works under the covers. They also explain how you can start u...
Feb 11, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 18
Summary One of the critical components for modern data infrastructure is a scalable and reliable messaging system. Publish-subscribe systems have been popular for many years, and recently stream oriented systems such as Kafka have been rising in prominence. This week Rajan Dhabalia and Matteo Merli discuss the work they have done on Pulsar, which supports both options, in addition to being globally scalable and fast. They explain how Pulsar is architected, how to scale it, and how it fits into y...
Feb 04, 2018•54 min•Ep. 17
Summary Sharing data across multiple computers, particularly when it is large and changing, is a difficult problem to solve. In order to provide a simpler way to distribute and version data sets among collaborators the Dat Project was created. In this episode Danielle Robinson and Joe Hand explain how the project got started, how it functions, and some of the many ways that it can be used. They also explain the plans that the team has for upcoming features and uses that you can watch out for in ...
Jan 29, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 16
Summary The majority of the conversation around machine learning and big data pertains to well-structured and cleaned data sets. Unfortunately, that is just a small percentage of the information that is available, so the rest of the sources of knowledge in a company are housed in so-called “Dark Data” sets. In this episode Alex Ratner explains how the work that he and his fellow researchers are doing on Snorkel can be used to extract value by leveraging labeling functions written by domain exper...
Jan 22, 2018•37 min•Ep. 15
Summary As we scale our systems to handle larger volumes of data, geographically distributed users, and varied data sources the requirement to distribute the computational resources for managing that information becomes more pronounced. In order to ensure that all of the distributed nodes in our systems agree with each other we need to build mechanisms to properly handle replication of data and conflict resolution. In this episode Christopher Meiklejohn discusses the research he is doing with Co...
Jan 15, 2018•46 min•Ep. 14
Summary PostGreSQL has become one of the most popular and widely used databases, and for good reason. The level of extensibility that it supports has allowed it to be used in virtually every environment. At Citus Data they have built an extension to support running it in a distributed fashion across large volumes of data with parallelized queries for improved performance. In this episode Ozgun Erdogan, the CTO of Citus, and Craig Kerstiens, Citus Product Manager, discuss how the company got star...
Jan 08, 2018•47 min•Ep. 13
Summary Data oriented applications that need to operate on large, fast-moving sterams of information can be difficult to build and scale due to the need to manage their state. In this episode Sean T. Allen, VP of engineering for Wallaroo Labs, explains how Wallaroo was designed and built to reduce the cognitive overhead of building this style of project. He explains the motivation for building Wallaroo, how it is implemented, and how you can start using it today. Preamble Hello and welcome to th...
Dec 25, 2017•59 min•Ep. 12
Summary Time series databases have long been the cornerstone of a robust metrics system, but the existing options are often difficult to manage in production. In this episode Jeroen van der Heijden explains his motivation for writing a new database, SiriDB, the challenges that he faced in doing so, and how it works under the hood. Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhe...
Dec 18, 2017•34 min•Ep. 11
Summary To process your data you need to know what shape it has, which is why schemas are important. When you are processing that data in multiple systems it can be difficult to ensure that they all have an accurate representation of that schema, which is why Confluent has built a schema registry that plugs into Kafka. In this episode Ewen Cheslack-Postava explains what the schema registry is, how it can be used, and how they built it. He also discusses how it can be extended for other deploymen...
Dec 10, 2017•49 min•Ep. 10
Summary We have tools and platforms for collaborating on software projects and linking them together, wouldn’t it be nice to have the same capabilities for data? The team at data.world are working on building a platform to host and share data sets for public and private use that can be linked together to build a semantic web of information. The CTO, Bryon Jacob, discusses how the company got started, their mission, and how they have built and evolved their technical infrastructure. Preamble Hell...
Dec 03, 2017•46 min•Ep. 9
Summary With the wealth of formats for sending and storing data it can be difficult to determine which one to use. In this episode Doug Cutting, creator of Avro, and Julien Le Dem, creator of Parquet, dig into the different classes of serialization formats, what their strengths are, and how to choose one for your workload. They also discuss the role of Arrow as a mechanism for in-memory data sharing and how hardware evolution will influence the state of the art for data formats. Preamble Hello a...
Nov 22, 2017•52 min•Ep. 8
Summary Buzzfeed needs to be able to understand how its users are interacting with the myriad articles, videos, etc. that they are posting. This lets them produce new content that will continue to be well-received. To surface the insights that they need to grow their business they need a robust data infrastructure to reliably capture all of those interactions. Walter Menendez is a data engineer on their infrastructure team and in this episode he describes how they manage data ingestion from a wi...
Nov 14, 2017•44 min•Ep. 7
Summary Building a data pipeline that is reliable and flexible is a difficult task, especially when you have a small team. Astronomer is a platform that lets you skip straight to processing your valuable business data. Ry Walker, the CEO of Astronomer, explains how the company got started, how the platform works, and their commitment to open source. Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure When you’re ready to launch your next project ...
Aug 06, 2017•43 min•Ep. 6
Summary Yelp needs to be able to consume and process all of the user interactions that happen in their platform in as close to real-time as possible. To achieve that goal they embarked on a journey to refactor their monolithic architecture to be more modular and modern, and then they open sourced it! In this episode Justin Cunningham joins me to discuss the decisions they made and the lessons they learned in the process, including what worked, what didn’t, and what he would do differently if he ...
Jun 18, 2017•42 min•Ep. 5
Summary If you like the features of Cassandra DB but wish it ran faster with fewer resources then ScyllaDB is the answer you have been looking for. In this episode Eyal Gutkind explains how Scylla was created and how it differentiates itself in the crowded database market. Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch...
Mar 18, 2017•35 min•Ep. 4
Summary What exactly is data engineering? How has it evolved in recent years and where is it going? How do you get started in the field? In this episode, Maxime Beauchemin joins me to discuss these questions and more. Transcript provided by CastSource Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. You can help support...
Mar 05, 2017•45 min•Ep. 3
Summary There is a vast constellation of tools and platforms for processing and analyzing your data. In this episode Matthew Rocklin talks about how Dask fills the gap between a task oriented workflow tool and an in memory processing framework, and how it brings the power of Python to bear on the problem of big data. Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the news...
Jan 22, 2017•46 min•Ep. 2
Summary Do you wish that you could track the changes in your data the same way that you track the changes in your code? Pachyderm is a platform for building a data lake with a versioned file system. It also lets you use whatever languages you want to run your analysis with its container based task graph. This week Daniel Whitenack shares the story of how the project got started, how it works under the covers, and how you can get started using it today! Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engi...
Jan 14, 2017•45 min•Ep. 1
Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. You can help support the show by checking out the Patreon page which is linked from the site. To help other people find the show you can leave a review on iTunes , or Google Play Music , share it on social media, and tell your friends and co-workers. I’m your host, Tobias...
Jan 08, 2017•4 min0
