The Data Stack Show

The PRQL: The Beauty of Commoditization

For this week's PRQL, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming episode with Michel Tricot.

63: The ETL - ELT Flip With Ciaran Dynes of Matillion

On this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas have a conversation with Ciaran Dynes, the Chief Product Officer at Matillion, a powerful and easy-to-use, completely cloud-capable ETL/ELT solution.

The PRQL: What Part of the Data Stack Will Be Commoditized Next?

On this week's PRQL, Kostas and Eric preview their upcoming conversation with Ciaran Dynes of Matillion.

62: The Internet of Everything with Rob Rastovich of ThingLogix

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: Rob’s career began as an early adopter in internet marketing and then he got the bug for machine-to-machine IoT (2:47) Making assumptions about mass scale (8:44) Pervasiveness of IoT in the market (11:47) Initial reactions to technological advances that we take for granted today (17:28) What makes IoT unique (23:56) Killing the SQL server (29:11) What really separates a smart device from a dumb device that can send data to the cloud (33:13) 5G, L...

The PRQL: Are you afraid of IOT?

In this PRQL, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Rob Rastovich of ThingLogix, Inc.

61: What is Data Design? With Kevin Gervais of Touchless

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: Kevin’s interaction with data at an early age (2:35) Working with telecom data (5:08) Analyzing emojis in customer sentiment (8:44) Infrastructure needed for diverse data (12:22) Building better interfaces and looking out for human error (24:17) Dealing with differences in identities in different layers of the stack (41:21) The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data enginee...

The PRQL: Will we ever get rid of the CSV?

Data Debrief: The Highs and Lows of Open Source Projects

Eric and Kostas break down further topics from episode 60 about stream processing and open source projects.

60: Architecting a Boring Stream Processing Tool With Ashley Jeffs of Benthos

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: A brief overview of Ashley’s background (2:47) Benthos’ creation and the problems it was meant to address (4:01) Use cases for Benthos (18:25) Key features of Benthos that make it stand out (22:23) Adding windowing to Benthos for fun (29:23) The highs and lows of maintaining an open source project for five years (32:17) The architecture of Benthos (36:23) The importance of ordering in streaming processing (42:15) Gaining traction with an open sou...

Data Debrief: What Open Source Data Projects Have Come Out of Facebook, Whoops, *Meta?

On this week's debrief, Kostas and Eric talk about the variety of open source projects that come from Facebook.

59: Making ETL Optional with Justin Borgman of Starburst Data

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: Starburst Data is Justin’s second startup (2:42) Starburst focuses on doing data warehousing analytics without the need for the data warehouse (4:14) Multi-cloud solutions among merger and acquisition use cases (8:32) Ways the stack is increasing in complexity (12:25) Comparing essential components of a data stack from 2010 to now (15:01) The future of ETL (27:36) The best maturity stage for an organization to implement Starburst (31:27) Starburs...

Data Debrief: Will Enterprise Build The Future of Data Tooling?

On this week's Data Debrief, Eric and Kostas dig more into the topic of data tooling.

58: Data Federation is No Longer The "F" Word with Scott Gnau of InterSystems

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: Solving problems with data has been a long-time passion of Scott’s (2:52) Day-to-day use of data at InterSystems (6:25) The technical aspects involved in constructing a data fabric (17:52) Companies at a variety of maturity levels can adopt a data fabric (26:49) A paradigm shift in the marketplace (28:39) Comparing and contrasting data fabric and data mesh (30:49) Sharing data across the business and not having it siloed in different departments ...

Data Debrief: Can Tools Help Solve Data Quality Organizational Challenges?

On this Data Debrief, Eric and Kostas are joined by Brian from Rudderstack to talk about Data Quality.

57: Improving Data Quality Using Data Product SLAs with Egor Gryaznov of Bigeye

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: Egor’s software engineering background and history with Uber (2:19) Experimentation platforms and analytics definitions (7:49) Bigeye’s function and use cases (9:40) Managing the relationship between the data engineer maintaining the pipelines and the downstream teams providing the context (18:49) Pinpointing problems in data compared to problems in software (21:55) Defining data quality at Bigeye (24:13) Machine learning models as a data product...

56: Stream Processing and Observability with Jeff Chao of Stripe

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: Jeff’s history with stream processing (2:52) Working with Mantis to address the impact of Netflix downtime (4:20) Defining observability as operational insight (6:58) Time series data and the value of data today (18:52) Data integration’s shift from batch to streaming (29:34) The current state of change data capture (32:20) How an engineer thinks of the end-user (56:21) The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for d...

55: Tables vs. Streams and Defining Real-Time with Pete Goddard of Deephaven Data Labs

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: Pete’s background in data engineering and capital market trading (2:10) Comparison of the tooling from 2012 when Deephaven started with that of today (10:30) Taking a closer look at defining real-time data (19:47) Getting non-technical people, clients, and developers all on the same platform (36:11) Deephaven’s incremental update model (40:25) Kafka, timely data flow, and Deephaven (44:22) Use cases for Deephaven (51:52) Going to GitHub to try ou...

54: The Center of the Modern Data Stack with Neil Rahilly of Mixpanel

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: Neil’s programming hobby turned into a career and how he cold-contacted Mixpanel for a job (2:28) Lessons learned from nine years at Mixpanel (5:05) Defining product analytics (8:06) How Mixpanel has evolved into the product it is today (10:56) The importance of Mixpanel’s real-time analysis (19:52) Looking at Arb, Mixpanel’s own arbitrary segmentation database (23:44) The business impact that the rise of the cloud data warehouse had on Mixpanel ...

53: What Religion, a Cult, and a Tech Product Have in Common, with Bart Farrell of DoKC

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: Bart’s journey from southern California, to New York, to Egypt, to London, to Spain (3:31) Exposure to different communities and finding shared language and experience (10:21) Looking back at early online communities and how they furthered your learning journey (27:50) How the level of niche-ness impacts a community (44:06) The cautionary tale of WeWork (57:28) Surefire community killers (1:03:44) Open source communities in tech and the passion t...

52: Discussing Data Warehouses, Lakes, and Meshes with James Serra of EY

Highlights from this week’s conversation include: James’ background at Microsoft and current work with EY’s data fabric (2:22) The external and internal facing components of EY’s data fabric (6:39) The importance of the data lineage (11:29) The most important requirements for data quality (15:32) Looking at the data capabilities of Microsoft (21:30) The data warehouse, explained (29:00) Using a data warehouse or a data lake (34:33) Defining the buzzword data mesh (51:13) The problem with data me...

51: Democratizing AI and ML with Tristan Zajonc of Continual

Topics in this wide-ranging conversation include: Tristan’s background with Cloudera and the need for continual operational ML and AI (3:15) How the complexity of Continual is hidden behind a simplicity of use (14:48) Focusing on data that lives within a data warehouse (18:43) Understanding features in the ML conversation (22:47) The three layers of Continual (26:11) The importance of SQL to Continual (30:19) Caching layers and the data warehouse centric approach (38:28) Betting on the warehouse...

50: From Data Infrastructure to Data Management with Ananth Packkildurai

Highlights from this week’s episode: Ananth’s background (2:51) The evolution of Slack (4:54) Kafka and Presto’s two of the most reliable and flexible tools for Ananth (9:43) How Snowflake gained an advantage over Presto (13:24) Opinions about data lakes (17:23) Core features of data infrastructure (23:22) The tools define the process, and not the other way around (31:30) Defining a data mesh (36:44) Data is inherently social in nature (40:31) Lessons learned from writing Data Engineering Weekly...

49: MLops - The Finalization of the Data Stack with Ben Rogojan of Facebook

Topics in this conversation include: Ben's background and his shift to data engineering (2:19) Trends in the data space: finding the most efficient tools, the Snowflake phenomenon, and keeping up with new functionalities (5:33) Key differences in data practices in small companies and Facebook-sized companies (12:38) Having to build tools specifically designed for Facebook because of SaaS product limitations (16:00) Team structure at Facebook (18:17) Developing more robust systems that are resist...

48: Season Two Recap with Eric Dodds and Kostas Pardalis

Highlights from this week’s episode: Dissecting the different team structures from organizations in season two (1:16) The people behind the data are key to the data itself (9:17) Open source licensing and the core components needed for large scale commercial viability (15:13) Game-changing core technologies in the new data economy (22:09) Snowflake vs. Databricks battle. "The UFC of Geeks" (25:54) The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week w...

47: Taming the Four Dragons of Data with Sven Balnojan of Mercateo Gruppe

Highlights from this week’s episode include: Sven's Ph.D. in Singularity Theory (2:59) The Databricks vs. Snowflake conversation (8:17) The difficulty of not just inventing something new, but making it accessible (18:01) Databricks and unstructured data (22:22) Organizational change responding to technological change (29:27) The three-dimensional evolution of a successful open source project (40:31) The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week...

46: A New Paradigm in Stream Processing with Arjun Narayan of Materialize

Highlights from this week’s episode include: Introducing Arjun and how he fell in love with databases (2:51) Looking at what Materialize brings to the stack (5:28) Analytics starts with a human in the loop and comes into its own when analysts get themselves out and automate it (15:46) Using Materialize instead of the materialized view from another tool (18:44) Comparing Postgres and Materialize and looking at what's under the hood of Materialize (23:16) Making Materialize simple to use (32:33) W...

45: Open Source and Attribution with Ophir Prusak of Codesmith

Highlights from today's conversation include: Ophir's decision to switch from software engineering to marketing and riding the startup train (2:39) Open sourcing in the world of software (5:55) How open source has changed Ophir's life as a marketeer working at startups (10:28) Chartio's sunsetting drove Ophir to search for a data tooling replacement (27:27) Discussing trends in adoption of tools for small scale and large scale companies (35:01) Data challenges related to attribution--how wrong d...

44: Leveraging Data in a Post-Covid World with Ruben Ugarte of Practico Analytics

Highlights from this week's episode: Ruben's background (2:36) Massive shifts in data caused by COVID (4:47) Big Tech is no longer untouchable (9:54) Accelerations in the BI space (15:17) A focus on people and on trust (23:43) Numbers are filtered by the biases of the people viewing them (28:46) AI trends and adoption (38:06) Using qualitative data for insights, particularly at early stages (40:56) Recommendations for taking stock of who is using the data and assessing what their skills are (50:...

43: Modern Authentication and User Management with Sokratis Vidros of Clerk.dev

Highlights from this week's episode: Sokratis' realization that big corporations were not the best thing for him (2:56) Transitioning for Workable to Clerk.dev (3:40) Convincing developers to outsource components to a service (9:36) Clerk's layered solutions and how it affects the developer and the end-user (12:41) Starting with Clerk from scratch vs. using Clerk to replace an existing component (19:55) Synergies and SaaS starter kit (24:06) Building Clerk to avoid a single point of failure (29:...

42: Scaling Data Science with Ryan Boyer of Shipt

Highlights from this week’s episode include: Ryan's full circle path from stocking shelves at Target to using data science for a company owned by Target (2:00) Building great tools and wielding them effectively (5:04) Changes at Shipt since being acquired (9:29) How people’s bias impacts models built by data scientists (12:30) The different data sources Shipt incorporates (22:02) How Ryan's work as a data scientist has changed as Shipt has grown (25:29) How data science helps marketing (31:38) I...