Summary There are an increasing number of use cases for real time data, and the systems to power them are becoming more mature. Once you have a streaming platform up and running you need a way to keep an eye on it, including observability, discovery, and governance of your data. That’s what the Lenses.io DataOps platform is built for. In this episode CTO Andrew Stevenson discusses the challenges that arise from building decoupled systems, the benefits of using SQL as the common interface for you...
Jul 06, 2020•46 min•Ep. 140
Summary We have machines that can listen to and process human speech in a variety of languages, but dealing with unstructured sounds in our environment is a much greater challenge. The team at Audio Analytic are working to impart a sense of hearing to our myriad devices with their sound recognition technology. In this episode Dr. Chris Mitchell and Dr. Thomas le Cornu describe the challenges that they are faced with in the collection and labelling of high quality data to make this possible, incl...
Jun 30, 2020•57 min•Ep. 139
Summary The majority of analytics platforms are focused on use internal to an organization by business stakeholders. As the availability of data increases and overall literacy in how to interpret it and take action improves there is a growing need to bring business intelligence use cases to a broader audience. GoodData is a platform focused on simplifying the work of bringing data to employees and end users. In this episode Sheila Jung and Philip Farr discuss how the GoodData platform is being u...
Jun 23, 2020•52 min•Ep. 138
Summary Machine learning is a process driven by iteration and experimentation which requires fast and easy access to relevant features of the data being processed. In order to reduce friction in the process of developing and delivering models there has been a recent trend toward building a dedicated feature. In this episode Simba Khadder discusses his work at StreamSQL building a feature store to make creation, discovery, and monitoring of features fast and easy to manage. He describes the archi...
Jun 15, 2020•46 min•Ep. 137
Summary The landscape of data management and processing is rapidly changing and evolving. There are certain foundational elements that have remained steady, but as the industry matures new trends emerge and gain prominence. In this episode Astasia Myers of Redpoint Ventures shares her perspective as an investor on which categories she is paying particular attention to for the near to medium term. She discusses the work being done to address challenges in the areas of data quality, observability,...
Jun 08, 2020•55 min•Ep. 136
Summary Data lakes offer a great deal of flexibility and the potential for reduced cost for your analytics, but they also introduce a great deal of complexity. What used to be entirely managed by the database engine is now a composition of multiple systems that need to be properly configured to work in concert. In order to bring the DBA into the new era of data management the team at Upsolver added a SQL interface to their data lake platform. In this episode Upsolver CEO Ori Rafael and CTO Yoni ...
Jun 02, 2020•56 min•Ep. 135
Summary Gaining a complete view of the customer journey is especially difficult in B2B companies. This is due to the number of different individuals involved and the myriad ways that they interface with the business. Dreamdata integrates data from the multitude of platforms that are used by these organizations so that they can get a comprehensive view of their customer lifecycle. In this episode Ole Dallerup explains how Dreamdata was started, how their platform is architected, and the challenge...
May 25, 2020•47 min•Ep. 134
Summary The PostgreSQL database is massively popular due to its flexibility and extensive ecosystem of extensions, but it is still not the first choice for high performance analytics. Swarm64 aims to change that by adding support for advanced hardware capabilities like FPGAs and optimized usage of modern SSDs. In this episode CEO and co-founder Thomas Richter discusses his motivation for creating an extension to optimize Postgres hardware usage, the benefits of running your analytics on the same...
May 18, 2020•53 min•Ep. 133
Summary There have been several generations of platforms for managing streaming data, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and different areas of focus. Pulsar is one of the recent entrants which has quickly gained adoption and an impressive set of capabilities. In this episode Sijie Guo discusses his motivations for spending so much of his time and energy on contributing to the project and growing the community. His most recent endeavor at StreamNative is focused on combining the capab...
May 11, 2020•55 min•Ep. 132
Summary Data management is hard at any scale, but working in the context of an enterprise organization adds even greater complexity. Infoworks is a platform built to provide a unified set of tooling for managing the full lifecycle of data in large businesses. By reducing the barrier to entry with a graphical interface for defining data transformations and analysis, it makes it easier to bring the domain experts into the process. In this interview co-founder and CTO of Infoworks Amar Arsikere exp...
May 04, 2020•46 min•Ep. 131
Summary Data is a critical element to every role in an organization, which is also what makes managing it so challenging. With so many different opinions about which pieces of information are most important, how it needs to be accessed, and what to do with it, many data projects are doomed to failure. In this episode Chris Bergh explains how taking an agile approach to delivering value can drive down the complexity that grows out of the varied needs of the business. Building a DataOps workflow t...
Apr 28, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 130
Summary Modern applications frequently require access to real-time data, but building and maintaining the systems that make that possible is a complex and time consuming endeavor. Eventador is a managed platform designed to let you focus on using the data that you collect, without worrying about how to make it reliable. In this episode Eventador Founder and CEO Kenny Gorman describes how the platform is architected, the challenges inherent to managing reliable streams of data, the simplicity off...
Apr 20, 2020•51 min•Ep. 129
Summary The software applications that we build for our businesses are a rich source of data, but accessing and extracting that data is often a slow and error-prone process. Rookout has built a platform to separate the data collection process from the lifecycle of your code. In this episode, CTO Liran Haimovitch discusses the benefits of shortening the iteration cycle and bringing non-engineers into the process of identifying useful data. This was a great conversation about the importance of dem...
Apr 14, 2020•26 min•Ep. 128
Summary Knowledge graphs are a data resource that can answer questions beyond the scope of traditional data analytics. By organizing and storing data to emphasize the relationship between entities, we can discover the complex connections between multiple sources of information. In this episode John Maiden talks about how Cherre builds knowledge graphs that provide powerful insights for their customers and the engineering challenges of building a scalable graph. If you’re wondering how to extract...
Apr 07, 2020•45 min•Ep. 127
Summary Building and maintaining a system that integrates and analyzes all of the data for your organization is a complex endeavor. Operating on a shoe-string budget makes it even more challenging. In this episode Tyler Colby shares his experiences working as a data professional in the non-profit sector. From managing Salesforce data models to wrangling a multitude of data sources and compliance challenges, he describes the biggest challenges that he is facing. Announcements Hello and welcome to...
Mar 30, 2020•45 min•Ep. 126
Summary There are a number of platforms available for object storage, including self-managed open source projects. But what goes on behind the scenes of the companies that run these systems at scale so you don’t have to? In this episode Will Smith shares the journey that he and his team at Linode recently completed to bring a fast and reliable S3 compatible object storage to production for your benefit. He discusses the challenges of running object storage for public usage, some of the interesti...
Mar 23, 2020•36 min•Ep. 125
Summary CouchDB is a distributed document database built for scale and ease of operation. With a built-in synchronization protocol and a HTTP interface it has become popular as a backend for web and mobile applications. Created 15 years ago, it has accrued some technical debt which is being addressed with a refactored architecture based on FoundationDB. In this episode Adam Kocoloski shares the history of the project, how it works under the hood, and how the new design will improve the project f...
Mar 17, 2020•55 min•Ep. 124
Summary Data governance is a complex endeavor, but scaling it to meet the needs of a complex or globally distributed organization requires a well considered and coherent strategy. In this episode Tim Ward describes an architecture that he has used successfully with multiple organizations to scale compliance. By treating it as a graph problem, where each hub in the network has localized control with inheritance of higher level controls it reduces overhead and provides greater flexibility. Tim pro...
Mar 09, 2020•54 min•Ep. 123
Summary Building applications on top of unbounded event streams is a complex endeavor, requiring careful integration of multiple disparate systems that were engineered in isolation. The ksqlDB project was created to address this state of affairs by building a unified layer on top of the Kafka ecosystem for stream processing. Developers can work with the SQL constructs that they are familiar with while automatically getting the durability and reliability that Kafka offers. In this episode Michael...
Mar 02, 2020•44 min•Ep. 122
Summary Misaligned priorities across business units can lead to tensions that drive members of the organization to build data and analytics projects without the guidance or support of engineering or IT staff. The availability of cloud platforms and managed services makes this a viable option, but can lead to downstream challenges. In this episode Sean Knapp and Charlie Crocker share their experiences of working in and with companies that have dealt with shadow IT projects and the importance of e...
Feb 25, 2020•46 min•Ep. 121
Summary One of the biggest challenges in building reliable platforms for processing event pipelines is managing the underlying infrastructure. At Snowplow Analytics the complexity is compounded by the need to manage multiple instances of their platform across customer environments. In this episode Josh Beemster, the technical operations lead at Snowplow, explains how they manage automation, deployment, monitoring, scaling, and maintenance of their streaming analytics pipeline for event data. He ...
Feb 18, 2020•49 min•Ep. 120
Summary Designing the structure for your data warehouse is a complex and challenging process. As businesses deal with a growing number of sources and types of information that they need to integrate, they need a data modeling strategy that provides them with flexibility and speed. Data Vault is an approach that allows for evolving a data model in place without requiring destructive transformations and massive up front design to answer valuable questions. In this episode Kent Graziano shares his ...
Feb 09, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 119
Summary Every business collects data in some fashion, but sometimes the true value of the collected information only comes when it is combined with other data sources. Data trusts are a legal framework for allowing businesses to collaboratively pool their data. This allows the members of the trust to increase the value of their individual repositories and gain new insights which would otherwise require substantial effort in duplicating the data owned by their peers. In this episode Tom Plagge an...
Feb 03, 2020•57 min•Ep. 118
Summary Data pipelines are complicated and business critical pieces of technical infrastructure. Unfortunately they are also complex and difficult to test, leading to a significant amount of technical debt which contributes to slower iteration cycles. In this episode James Campbell describes how he helped create the Great Expectations framework to help you gain control and confidence in your data delivery workflows, the challenges of validating and monitoring the quality and accuracy of your dat...
Jan 27, 2020•47 min•Ep. 117
Summary Building a reliable data platform is a neverending task. Even if you have a process that works for you and your business there can be unexpected events that require a change in your platform architecture. In this episode the head of data for Mayvenn shares their experience migrating an existing set of streaming workflows onto the Ascend platform after their previous vendor was acquired and changed their offering. This is an interesting discussion about the ongoing maintenance and decisio...
Jan 20, 2020•39 min•Ep. 116
Summary The modern era of software development is identified by ubiquitous access to elastic infrastructure for computation and easy automation of deployment. This has led to a class of applications that can quickly scale to serve users worldwide. This requires a new class of data storage which can accomodate that demand without having to rearchitect your system at each level of growth. YugabyteDB is an open source database designed to support planet scale workloads with high data density and fu...
Jan 13, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 115
Summary Databases are useful for inspecting the current state of your application, but inspecting the history of that data can get messy without a way to track changes as they happen. Debezium is an open source platform for reliable change data capture that you can use to build supplemental systems for everything from maintaining audit trails to real-time updates of your data warehouse. In this episode Gunnar Morling and Randall Hauch explain why it got started, how it works, and some of the myr...
Jan 06, 2020•53 min•Ep. 114
Summary DataDog is one of the most successful companies in the space of metrics and monitoring for servers and cloud infrastructure. In order to support their customers, they need to capture, process, and analyze massive amounts of timeseries data with a high degree of uptime and reliability. Vadim Semenov works on their data engineering team and joins the podcast in this episode to discuss the challenges that he works through, the systems that DataDog has built to power their business, and how ...
Dec 30, 2019•46 min•Ep. 113
Summary Transactional databases used in applications are optimized for fast reads and writes with relatively simple queries on a small number of records. Data warehouses are optimized for batched writes and complex analytical queries. Between those use cases there are varying levels of support for fast reads on quickly changing data. To address that need more completely the team at Materialize has created an engine that allows for building queryable views of your data as it is continually update...
Dec 23, 2019•48 min•Ep. 112
Summary Building clean datasets with reliable and reproducible ingestion pipelines is completely useless if it’s not possible to find them and understand their provenance. The solution to discoverability and tracking of data lineage is to incorporate a metadata repository into your data platform. The metadata repository serves as a data catalog and a means of reporting on the health and status of your datasets when it is properly integrated into the rest of your tools. At WeWork they needed a sy...
Dec 16, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 111
