Summary The predominant pattern for data integration in the cloud has become extract, load, and then transform or ELT. Matillion was an early innovator of that approach and in this episode CTO Ed Thompson explains how they have evolved the platform to keep pace with the rapidly changing ecosystem. He describes how the platform is architected, the challenges related to selling cloud technologies into enterprise organizations, and how you can adopt Matillion for your own workflows to reduce the ma...
May 02, 2022•53 min•Ep. 286
Summary Building a data platform is an iterative and evolutionary process that requires collaboration with internal stakeholders to ensure that their needs are being met. Yotpo has been on a journey to evolve and scale their data platform to continue serving the needs of their organization as it increases the scale and sophistication of data usage. In this episode Doron Porat and Liran Yogev explain how they arrived at their current architecture, the capabilities that they are optimizing for, an...
May 02, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 285
Summary A huge amount of effort goes into modeling and shaping data to make it available for analytical purposes. This is often due to the need to simplify the final queries so that they are performant for visualization or limited exploration. In order to cut down the level of effort involved in making data usable, Matthew Halliday and his co-founders created Incorta as an end-to-end, in-memory analytical engine that removes barriers to insights on your data. In this episode he explains how the ...
Apr 24, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 284
Summary There are very few tools which are equally useful for data engineers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers. WhyLogs is a powerful library for flexibly instrumenting all of your data systems to understand the entire lifecycle of your data from source to productionized model. In this episode Andy Dang explains why the project was created, how you can apply it to your existing data systems, and how it functions to provide detailed context for being able to gain insight into all o...
Apr 24, 2022•59 min•Ep. 283
Summary The next paradigm shift in computing is coming in the form of quantum technologies. Quantum procesors have gained significant attention for their speed and computational power. The next frontier is in quantum networking for highly secure communications and the ability to distribute across quantum processing units without costly translation between quantum and classical systems. In this episode Prineha Narang, co-founder and CTO of Aliro, explains how these systems work, the capabilities ...
Apr 18, 2022•40 min•Ep. 282
Summary Putting machine learning models into production and keeping them there requires investing in well-managed systems to manage the full lifecycle of data cleaning, training, deployment and monitoring. This requires a repeatable and evolvable set of processes to keep it functional. The term MLOps has been coined to encapsulate all of these principles and the broader data community is working to establish a set of best practices and useful guidelines for streamlining adoption. In this episode...
Apr 16, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 281
Summary Data engineering is a practice that is multi-faceted and requires integration with a large number of systems. This often means working across multiple tools to get the job done which can introduce significant cost to productivity due to the number of context switches. Rivery is a platform designed to reduce this incidental complexity and provide a single system for working across the different stages of the data lifecycle. In this episode CEO and founder Itamar Ben hemo explains how his ...
Apr 11, 2022•58 min•Ep. 280
Summary Any time that you are storing data about people there are a number of privacy and security considerations that come with it. Privacy engineering is a growing field in data management that focuses on how to protect attributes of personal data so that the containing datasets can be shared safely. In this episode Gretel co-founder and CTO John Myers explains how they are building tools for data engineers and analysts to incorporate privacy engineering techniques into their workflows and val...
Apr 10, 2022•49 min•Ep. 279
Summary The flexibility of software oriented data workflows is useful for fulfilling complex requirements, but for simple and repetitious use cases it adds significant complexity. Coalesce is a platform designed to reduce repetitive work for common workflows by adopting a visual pipeline builder to support your data warehouse transformations. In this episode Satish Jayanthi explains how he is building a framework to allow enterprises to move quickly while maintaining guardrails for data workflow...
Apr 03, 2022•43 min•Ep. 278
Summary Building a data platform for your organization is a challenging undertaking. Building multiple data platforms for other organizations as a service without burning out is another thing entirely. In this episode Brandon Beidel from Red Ventures shares his experiences as a data product manager in charge of helping his customers build scalable analytics systems that fit their needs. He explains the common patterns that have been useful across multiple use cases, as well as when and how to bu...
Apr 03, 2022•47 min•Ep. 277
Summary At the foundational layer many databases and data processing engines rely on key/value storage for managing the layout of information on the disk. RocksDB is one of the most popular choices for this component and has been incorporated into popular systems such as ksqlDB. As these systems are scaled to larger volumes of data and higher throughputs the RocksDB engine can become a bottleneck for performance. In this episode Adi Gelvan shares the work that he and his team at SpeeDB have put ...
Mar 27, 2022•47 min•Ep. 276
Summary Data governance is a practice that requires a high degree of flexibility and collaboration at the organizational and technical levels. The growing prominence of cloud and hybrid environments in data management adds additional stress to an already complex endeavor. Privacera is an enterprise grade solution for cloud and hybrid data governance built on top of the robust and battle tested Apache Ranger project. In this episode Balaji Ganesan shares how his experiences building and maintaini...
Mar 27, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 275
Summary Data assets and the pipelines that create them have become critical production infrastructure for companies. This adds a requirement for reliability and management of up-time similar to application infrastructure. In this episode Francisco Alberini and Mei Tao share their insights on what incident management looks like for data platforms and the teams that support them. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’r...
Mar 20, 2022•57 min•Ep. 274
Summary Data and analytics are permeating every system, including customer-facing applications. The introduction of embedded analytics to an end-user product creates a significant shift in requirements for your data layer. The Pinot OLAP datastore was created for this purpose, optimizing for low latency queries on rapidly updating datasets with highly concurrent queries. In this episode Kishore Gopalakrishna and Xiang Fu explain how it is able to achieve those characteristics, their work at Star...
Mar 20, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 273
Summary Data observability is a term that has been co-opted by numerous vendors with varying ideas of what it should mean. At Acceldata, they view it as a holistic approach to understanding the computational and logical elements that power your analytical capabilities. In this episode Tristan Spaulding, head of product at Acceldata, explains the multi-dimensional nature of gaining visibility into your running data platform and how they have architected their platform to assist in that endeavor. ...
Mar 14, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 271
Summary The modern data stack is a constantly moving target which makes it difficult to adopt without prior experience. In order to accelerate the time to deliver useful insights at organizations of all sizes that are looking to take advantage of these new and evolving architectures Tarush Aggarwal founded 5X Data. In this episode he explains how he works with these companies to deploy the technology stack and pairs them with an experienced engineer who assists with the implementation and traini...
Mar 14, 2022•54 min•Ep. 272
Summary When you think about selecting a database engine for your project you typically consider options focused on serving multiple concurrent users. Sometimes what you really need is an embedded database that is blazing fast for single user workloads. DuckDB is an in-process database engine optimized for OLAP applications to speed up your analytical queries that meets you where you are, whether that’s Python, R, Java, even the web. In this episode, Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator and CEO of...
Mar 05, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 270
Summary Databases are an important component of application architectures, but they are often difficult to work with. HarperDB was created with the core goal of being a developer friendly database engine. In the process they ended up creating a scalable distributed engine that works across edge and datacenter environments to support a variety of novel use cases. In this episode co-founder and CEO Stephen Goldberg shares the history of the project, how it is architected to achieve their goals, an...
Mar 05, 2022•50 min•Ep. 269
Summary Building a data platform is a complex journey that requires a significant amount of planning to do well. It requires knowledge of the available technologies, the requirements of the operating environment, and the expectations of the stakeholders. In this episode Tobias Macey, the host of the show, reflects on his plans for building a data platform and what he has learned from running the podcast that is influencing his choices. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podc...
Feb 28, 2022•40 min•Ep. 267
Summary There are a wealth of options for managing structured and textual data, but unstructured binary data assets are not as well supported across the ecosystem. As organizations start to adopt cloud technologies they need a way to manage the distribution, discovery, and collaboration of data across their operating environments. To help solve this complicated challenge Krishna Subramanian and her co-founders at Komprise built a system that allows you to treat use and secure your data wherever ...
Feb 28, 2022•55 min•Ep. 268
Summary Python has grown to be one of the top languages used for all aspects of data, from collection and cleaning, to analysis and machine learning. Along with that growth has come an explosion of tools and engines that help power these workflows, which introduces a great deal of complexity when scaling from single machines and exploratory development to massively parallel distributed computation. In answer to that challenge the Fugue project offers an interface to automatically translate acros...
Feb 21, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 266
Summary The life sciences as an industry has seen incredible growth in scale and sophistication, along with the advances in data technology that make it possible to analyze massive amounts of genomic information. In this episode Guy Yachdav, director of software engineering for ImmunAI, shares the complexities that are inherent to managing data workflows for bioinformatics. He also explains how he has architected the systems that ingest, process, and distribute the data that he is responsible fo...
Feb 21, 2022•43 min•Ep. 265
Summary Streaming data sources are becoming more widely available as tools to handle their storage and distribution mature. However it is still a challenge to analyze this data as it arrives, while supporting integration with static data in a unified syntax. Deephaven is a project that was designed from the ground up to offer an intuitive way for you to bring your code to your data, whether it is streaming or static without having to know which is which. In this episode Pete Goddard, founder and...
Feb 14, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 264
Summary Collecting, integrating, and activating data are all challenging activities. When that data pertains to your customers it can become even more complex. To simplify the work of managing the full flow of your customer data and keep you in full control the team at Rudderstack created their eponymous open source platform that allows you to work with first and third party data, as well as build and manage reverse ETL workflows. In this episode CEO and founder Soumyadeb Mitra explains how Rudd...
Feb 14, 2022•48 min•Ep. 263
Summary Along with globalization of our societies comes the need to analyze the geospatial and geotemporal data that is needed to manage the growth in commerce, communications, and other activities. In order to make geospatial analytics more maintainable and scalable there has been an increase in the number of database engines that provide extensions to their SQL syntax that supports manipulation of spatial data. In this episode Matthew Forrest shares his experiences of working in the domain of ...
Feb 07, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 262
Summary There are many dimensions to the work of protecting the privacy of users in our data. When you need to share a data set with other teams, departments, or businesses then it is of utmost importance that you eliminate or obfuscate personal information. In this episode Will Thompson explores the many ways that sensitive data can be leaked, re-identified, or otherwise be at risk, as well as the different strategies that can be employed to mitigate those attack vectors. He also explains how h...
Feb 06, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 261
Summary The Data Engineering Podcast has been going for five years now and has included conversations and interviews with a huge number of guests, covering a broad range of topics. In addition to that, the host curated the essays contained in the book "97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know", using the knowledge and context gained from running the show to inform the selection process. In this episode he shares some reflections on producing the podcast, compiling the book, and releva...
Jan 31, 2022•42 min•Ep. 260
Summary Pandas is a powerful tool for cleaning, transforming, manipulating, or enriching data, among many other potential uses. As a result it has become a standard tool for data engineers for a wide range of applications. Matt Harrison is a Python expert with a long history of working with data who now spends his time on consulting and training. He recently wrote a book on effective patterns for Pandas code, and in this episode he shares advice on how to write efficient data processing routines...
Jan 31, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 259
Summary Data platforms are exemplified by a complex set of connections that are subject to a set of constantly evolving requirements. In order to make this a tractable problem it is necessary to define boundaries for communication between concerns, which brings with it the need to establish interface contracts for communicating across those boundaries. The recent move toward the data mesh as a formalized architecture that builds on this design provides the language that data teams need to make t...
Jan 23, 2022•56 min•Ep. 258
Summary Data engineering is a relatively young and rapidly expanding field, with practitioners having a wide array of experiences as they navigate their careers. Ashish Mrig currently leads the data analytics platform for Wayfair, as well as running a local data engineering meetup. In this episode he shares his career journey, the challenges related to management of data professionals, and the platform design that he and his team have built to power analytics at a large company. He also provides...
Jan 23, 2022•53 min•Ep. 257
