Summary The most important gauge of success for a data platform is the level of trust in the accuracy of the information that it provides. In order to build and maintain that trust it is necessary to invest in defining, monitoring, and enforcing data quality metrics. In this episode Michael Harper advocates for proactive data quality and starting with the source, rather than being reactive and having to work backwards from when a problem is found. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engi...
Nov 14, 2021•59 min•Ep. 238
Summary A significant source of friction and wasted effort in building and integrating data management systems is the fragmentation of metadata across various tools. After experiencing the impacts of fragmented metadata and previous attempts at building a solution Suresh Srinivas and Sriharsha Chintalapani created the OpenMetadata project. In this episode they share the lessons that they have learned through their previous attempts and the positive impact that a unified metadata layer had during...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 237
Summary Business intelligence is often equated with a collection of dashboards that show various charts and graphs representing data for an organization. What is overlooked in that characterization is the level of complexity and effort that are required to collect and present that information, and the opportunities for providing those insights in other contexts. In this episode Telmo Silva explains how he co-founded ClicData to bring full featured business intelligence and reporting to every org...
Nov 06, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 236
Summary The precursor to widespread adoption of cloud data warehouses was the creation of customer data platforms. Acting as a centralized repository of information about how your customers interact with your organization they drove a wave of analytics about how to improve products based on actual usage data. A natural outgrowth of that capability is the more recent growth of reverse ETL systems that use those analytics to feed back into the operational systems used to engage with the customer. ...
Nov 05, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 235
Summary The perennial question of data warehousing is how to model the information that you are storing. This has given rise to methods as varied as star and snowflake schemas, data vault modeling, and wide tables. The challenge with many of those approaches is that they are optimized for answering known questions but brittle and cumbersome when exploring unknowns. In this episode Ahmed Elsamadisi shares his journey to find a more flexible and universal data model in the form of the "activity sc...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 234
Summary Streaming data systems have been growing more capable and flexible over the past few years. Despite this, it is still challenging to build reliable pipelines for stream processing. In this episode Eric Sammer discusses the shortcomings of the current set of streaming engines and how they force engineers to work at an extremely low level of abstraction. He also explains why he started Decodable to address that limitation and the work that he and his team have done to let data engineers bu...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 233
Summary The market for business intelligence has been going through an evolutionary shift in recent years. One of the driving forces for that change has been the rise of analytics engineering powered by dbt. Lightdash has fully embraced that shift by building an entire open source business intelligence framework that is powered by dbt models. In this episode Oliver Laslett describes why dashboards aren’t sufficient for business analytics, how Lightdash promotes the work that you are already doin...
Oct 23, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 232
Summary The focus of the past few years has been to consolidate all of the organization’s data into a cloud data warehouse. As a result there have been a number of trends in data that take advantage of the warehouse as a single focal point. Among those trends is the advent of operational analytics, which completes the cycle of data from collection, through analysis, to driving further action. In this episode Boris Jabes, CEO of Census, explains how the work of synchronizing cleaned and consolida...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 231
Summary The binding element of all data work is the metadata graph that is generated by all of the workflows that produce the assets used by teams across the organization. The DataHub project was created as a way to bring order to the scale of LinkedIn’s data needs. It was also designed to be able to work for small scale systems that are just starting to develop in complexity. In order to support the project and make it even easier to use for organizations of every size Shirshanka Das and Swaroo...
Oct 16, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 230
Summary Organizations of all sizes are striving to become data driven, starting in earnest with the rise of big data a decade ago. With the never-ending growth in data sources and methods for aggregating and analyzing them, the use of data to direct the business has become a requirement. Randy Bean has been helping enterprise organizations define and execute their data strategies since before the age of big data. In this episode he discusses his experiences and how he approached the work of dist...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 229
Summary The key to making data valuable to business users is the ability to calculate meaningful metrics and explore them along useful dimensions. Business intelligence tools have provided this capability for years, but they don’t offer a means of exposing those metrics to other systems. Metriql is an open source project that provides a headless BI system where you can define your metrics and share them with all of your other processes. In this episode Burak Kabakcı shares the story behind the p...
Oct 08, 2021•44 min•Ep. 228
Summary Transactions are a necessary feature for ensuring that a set of actions are all performed as a single unit of work. In streaming systems this is necessary to ensure that a set of messages or transformations are all executed together across different queues. In this episode Denis Rystsov explains how he added support for transactions to the Redpanda streaming engine. He discusses the use cases for transactions, the different strategies, semantics, and guarantees that they might need to su...
Oct 06, 2021•46 min•Ep. 227
Summary Aerospike is a database engine that is designed to provide millisecond response times for queries across terabytes or petabytes. In this episode Chief Strategy Officer, Lenley Hensarling, explains how the ability to process these large volumes of information in real-time allows businesses to unlock entirely new capabilities. He also discusses the technical implementation that allows for such extreme performance and how the data model contributes to the scalability of the system. If you n...
Oct 02, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 226
Summary The promise of online services is that they will make your life easier in exchange for collecting data about you. The reality is that they use more information than you realize for purposes that are not what you intended. There have been many attempts to harness all of the data that you generate for gaining useful insights about yourself, but they are generally difficult to set up and manage or require software development experience. The team at Prifina have built a platform that allows...
Sep 30, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 225
Summary The accuracy and availability of data has become critically important to the day-to-day operation of businesses. Similar to the practice of site reliability engineering as a means of ensuring consistent uptime of web services, there has been a new trend of building data reliability engineering practices in companies that rely heavily on their data. In this episode Egor Gryaznov explains how this practice manifests from a technical and organizational perspective and how you can start adop...
Sep 26, 2021•58 min•Ep. 224
Summary Python has beome the de facto language for working with data. That has brought with it a number of challenges having to do with the speed and scalability of working with large volumes of information.There have been many projects and strategies for overcoming these challenges, each with their own set of tradeoffs. In this episode Ehsan Totoni explains how he built the Bodo project to bring the speed and processing power of HPC techniques to the Python data ecosystem without requiring any ...
Sep 25, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 223
Summary Building, scaling, and maintaining the operational components of a machine learning workflow are all hard problems. Add the work of creating the model itself, and it’s not surprising that a majority of companies that could greatly benefit from machine learning have yet to either put it into production or see the value. Tristan Zajonc recognized the complexity that acts as a barrier to adoption and created the Continual platform in response. In this episode he shares his perspective on th...
Sep 19, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 222
Summary Biology has been gaining a lot of attention in recent years, even before the pandemic. As an outgrowth of that popularity, a new field has grown up that pairs statistics and compuational analysis with scientific research, namely bioinformatics. This brings with it a unique set of challenges for data collection, data management, and analytical capabilities. In this episode Jillian Rowe shares her experience of working in the field and supporting teams of scientists and analysts with the d...
Sep 19, 2021•55 min•Ep. 221
Summary The Cassandra database is one of the first open source options for globally scalable storage systems. Since its introduction in 2008 it has been powering systems at every scale. The community recently released a new major version that marks a milestone in its maturity and stability as a project and database. In this episode Ben Bromhead, CTO of Instaclustr, shares the challenges that the community has worked through, the work that went into the release, and how the stability and testing ...
Sep 12, 2021•59 min•Ep. 220
Summary Gartner analysts are tasked with identifying promising companies each year that are making an impact in their respective categories. For businesses that are working in the data management and analytics space they recognized the efforts of Timbr.ai, Soda Data, Nexla, and Tada. In this episode the founders and leaders of each of these organizations share their perspective on the current state of the market, and the challenges facing businesses and data professionals today. Announcements He...
Sep 09, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 219
Summary The term "data platform" gets thrown around a lot, but have you stopped to think about what it actually means for you and your organization? In this episode Lior Gavish, Lior Solomon, and Atul Gupte share their view of what it means to have a data platform, discuss their experiences building them at various companies, and provide advice on how to treat them like a software product. This is a valuable conversation about how to approach the work of selecting the tools that you use to power...
Sep 04, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 218
Summary The Presto project has become the de facto option for building scalable open source analytics in SQL for the data lake. In recent months the community has focused their efforts on making it the fastest possible option for running your analytics in the cloud. In this episode Dipti Borkar discusses the work that she and her team are doing at Ahana to simplify the work of running your own PrestoDB environment in the cloud. She explains how they are optimizin the runtime to reduce latency an...
Sep 02, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 217
Summary The reason that so much time and energy is spent on data integration is because of how our applications are designed. By making the software be the owner of the data that it generates, we have to go through the trouble of extracting the information to then be used elsewhere. The team at Cinchy are working to bring about a new paradigm of software architecture that puts the data as the central element. In this episode Dan DeMers, Cinchy’s CEO, explains how their concept of a "Dataware" pl...
Aug 28, 2021•51 min•Ep. 216
Summary The technological and social ecosystem of data engineering and data management has been reaching a stage of maturity recently. As part of this stage in our collective journey the focus has been shifting toward operation and automation of the infrastructure and workflows that power our analytical workloads. It is an encouraging sign for the industry, but it is still a complex and challenging undertaking. In order to make this world of DataOps more accessible and manageable the team at Nex...
Aug 25, 2021•58 min•Ep. 215
Summary Data lakes have been gaining popularity alongside an increase in their sophistication and usability. Despite improvements in performance and data architecture they still require significant knowledge and experience to deploy and manage. In this episode Vikrant Dubey discusses his work on the Cuelake project which allows data analysts to build a lakehouse with SQL queries. By building on top of Zeppelin, Spark, and Iceberg he and his team at Cuebook have built an autoscaled cloud native s...
Aug 21, 2021•28 min•Ep. 214
Summary A major concern that comes up when selecting a vendor or technology for storing and managing your data is vendor lock-in. What happens if the vendor fails? What if the technology can’t do what I need it to? Compilerworks set out to reduce the pain and complexity of migrating between platforms, and in the process added an advanced lineage tracking capability. In this episode Shevek, CTO of Compilerworks, takes us on an interesting journey through the many technical and social complexities...
Aug 18, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 213
Summary The vast majority of data tools and platforms that you hear about are designed for working with structured, text-based data. What do you do when you need to manage unstructured information, or build a computer vision model? Activeloop was created for exactly that purpose. In this episode Davit Buniatyan, founder and CEO of Activeloop, explains why he is spending his time and energy on building a platform to simplify the work of getting your unstructured data ready for machine learning. H...
Aug 15, 2021•49 min•Ep. 212
Summary All of the fancy data platform tools and shiny dashboards that you use are pointless if the consumers of your analysis don’t have trust in the answers. Stemma helps you establish and maintain that trust by giving visibility into who is using what data, annotating the reports with useful context, and understanding who is responsible for keeping it up to date. In this episode Mark Grover explains what he is building at Stemma, how it expands on the success of the Amundsen project, and why ...
Aug 10, 2021•53 min•Ep. 211
Summary Every organization needs to be able to use data to answer questions about their business. The trouble is that the data is usually spread across a wide and shifting array of systems, from databases to dashboards. The other challenge is that even if you do find the information you are seeking, there might not be enough context available to determine how to use it or what it means. Castor is building a data discovery platform aimed at solving this problem, allowing you to search for and doc...
Aug 07, 2021•53 min•Ep. 210
Summary Data lake architectures have largely been biased toward batch processing workflows due to the volume of data that they are designed for. With more real-time requirements and the increasing use of streaming data there has been a struggle to merge fast, incremental updates with large, historical analysis. Vinoth Chandar helped to create the Hudi project while at Uber to address this challenge. By adding support for small, incremental inserts into large table structures, and building suppor...
Aug 03, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 209
