Summary There is a lot of attention on the database market and cloud data warehouses. While they provide a measure of convenience, they also require you to sacrifice a certain amount of control over your data. If you want to build a warehouse that gives you both control and flexibility then you might consider building on top of the venerable PostgreSQL project. In this episode Thomas Richter and Joshua Drake share their advice on how to build a production ready data warehouse with Postgres. Anno...
May 14, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep 186•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Building an API for real-time data is a challenging project. Making it robust, scalable, and fast is a full time job. The team at Tinybird wants to make it easy to turn a continuous stream of data into a production ready API or data product. In this episode CEO Jorge Sancha explains how they have architected their system to handle high data throughput and fast response times, and why they have invested heavily in Clickhouse as the core of their platform. This is a great conversation abou...
May 11, 2021•54 min•Ep 185•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Spark is one of the most well-known frameworks for data processing, whether for batch or streaming, ETL or ML, and at any scale. Because of its popularity it has been deployed on every kind of platform you can think of. In this episode Jean-Yves Stephan shares the work that he is doing at Data Mechanics to make it sing on Kubernetes. He explains how operating in a cloud-native context simplifies some aspects of running the system while complicating others, how it simplifies the developme...
May 07, 2021•40 min•Ep 184•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The Data industry is changing rapidly, and one of the most active areas of growth is automation of data workflows. Taking cues from the DevOps movement of the past decade data professionals are orienting around the concept of DataOps. More than just a collection of tools, there are a number of organizational and conceptual changes that a proper DataOps approach depends on. In this episode Kevin Stumpf, CTO of Tecton, Maxime Beauchemin, CEO of Preset, and Lior Gavish, CTO of Monte Carlo, ...
May 04, 2021•57 min•Ep 183•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The reason for collecting, cleaning, and organizing data is to make it usable by the organization. One of the most common and widely used methods of access is through a business intelligence dashboard. Superset is an open source option that has been gaining popularity due to its flexibility and extensible feature set. In this episode Maxime Beauchemin discusses how data engineers can use Superset to provide self service access to data and deliver analytics. He digs into how it integrates...
Apr 27, 2021•47 min•Ep 182•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Most of the time when you think about a data pipeline or ETL job what comes to mind is a purely mechanistic progression of functions that move data from point A to point B. Sometimes, however, one of those transformations is actually a full-fledged machine learning project in its own right. In this episode Tal Galfsky explains how he and the team at Cherre tackled the problem of messy data for Addresses by building a natural language processing and entity resolution system that is served...
Apr 20, 2021•48 min•Ep 181•Transcript available on Metacast Summary "Business as usual" is changing, with more companies investing in data as a first class concern. As a result, the data team is growing and introducing more specialized roles. In this episode Josh Benamram, CEO and co-founder of Databand, describes the motivations for these emerging roles, how these positions affect the team dynamics, and the types of visibility that they need into the data platform to do their jobs effectively. He also talks about how his experience working wit...
Apr 13, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep 180•Transcript available on Metacast Summary One of the biggest obstacles to success in delivering data products is cross-team collaboration. Part of the problem is the difference in the information that each role requires to do their job and where they expect to find it. This introduces a barrier to communication that is difficult to overcome, particularly in teams that have not reached a significant level of maturity in their data journey. In this episode Prukalpa Sankar shares her experiences across multiple attempts at building...
Apr 06, 2021•58 min•Ep 179•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data quality is on the top of everyone’s mind recently, but getting it right is as challenging as ever. One of the contributing factors is the number of people who are involved in the process and the potential impact on the business if something goes wrong. In this episode Maarten Masschelein and Tom Baeyens share the work they are doing at Soda to bring everyone on board to make your data clean and reliable. They explain how they started down the path of building a solution for ma...
Mar 30, 2021•58 min•Ep 178•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The world of business is becoming increasingly dependent on information that is accurate up to the minute. For analytical systems, the only way to provide this reliably is by implementing change data capture (CDC). Unfortunately, this is a non-trivial undertaking, particularly for teams that don’t have extensive experience working with streaming data and complex distributed systems. In this episode Raghu Murthy, founder and CEO of Datacoral, does a deep dive on how he and his team ...
Mar 23, 2021•50 min•Ep 177•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The team at DoorDash has a complex set of optimization challenges to deal with using data that they collect from a multi-sided marketplace. In order to handle the volume and variety of information that they use to run and improve the business the data team has to build a platform that analysts and data scientists can use in a self-service manner. In this episode the head of data platform for DoorDash, Sudhir Tonse, discusses the technologies that they are using, the approach that they ta...
Mar 16, 2021•46 min•Ep 176•Transcript available on Metacast Summary A majority of the time spent in data engineering is copying data between systems to make the information available for different purposes. This introduces challenges such as keeping information synchronized, managing schema evolution, building transformations to match the expectations of the destination systems. H.O. Maycotte was faced with these same challenges but at a massive scale, leading him to question if there is a better way. After tasking some of his top engineers to consider t...
Mar 09, 2021•52 min•Ep 175•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The process of building and deploying machine learning projects requires a staggering number of systems and stakeholders to work in concert. In this episode Yaron Haviv, co-founder of Iguazio, discusses the complexities inherent to the process, as well as how he has worked to democratize the technologies necessary to make machine learning operations maintainable. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready...
Mar 02, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 174•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data integration is a critical piece of every data pipeline, yet it is still far from being a solved problem. There are a number of managed platforms available, but the list of options for an open source system that supports a large variety of sources and destinations is still embarrasingly short. The team at Airbyte is adding a new entry to that list with the goal of making robust and easy to use data integration more accessible to teams who want or need to maintain full control of thei...
Feb 23, 2021•52 min•Ep 173•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Every business aims to be data driven, but not all of them succeed in that effort. In order to be able to truly derive insights from the data that an organization collects, there are certain foundational capabilities that they need to have capacity for. In order to help more businesses build those foundations, Tarush Aggarwal created 5xData, offering collaborative workshops to assist in setting up the technical and organizational systems that are necessary to succeed. In this episode he ...
Feb 16, 2021•52 min•Ep 172•Transcript available on Metacast Summary With all of the tools and services available for building a data platform it can be difficult to separate the signal from the noise. One of the best ways to get a true understanding of how a technology works in practice is to hear from people who are running it in production. In this episode Zeeshan Qureshi and Michelle Ark share their experiences using DBT to manage the data warehouse for Shopify. They explain how the structured the project to allow for multiple teams to collaborate in ...
Feb 09, 2021•47 min•Ep 171•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Collecting and processing metrics for monitoring use cases is an interesting data problem. It is eminently possible to generate millions or billions of data points per second, the information needs to be propagated to a central location, processed, and analyzed in timeframes on the order of milliseconds or single-digit seconds, and the consumers of the data need to be able to query the information quickly and flexibly. As the systems that we build continue to grow in scale and complexity...
Feb 02, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 170•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Businesses often need to be able to ingest data from their customers in order to power the services that they provide. For each new source that they need to integrate with it is another custom set of ETL tasks that they need to maintain. In order to reduce the friction involved in supporting new data transformations David Molot and Hassan Syyid built the Hotlue platform. In this episode they describe the data integration challenges facing many B2B companies, how their work on the Hotglue...
Jan 26, 2021•34 min•Ep 169•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The data warehouse has become the central component of the modern data stack. Building on this pattern, the team at Hightouch have created a platform that synchronizes information about your customers out to third party systems for use by marketing and sales teams. In this episode Tejas Manohar explains the benefits of sourcing customer data from one location for all of your organization to use, the technical challenges of synchronizing the data to external systems with varying APIs, and...
Jan 19, 2021•1 hr•Ep 168•Transcript available on Metacast Summary As data professionals we have a number of tools available for storing, processing, and analyzing data. We also have tools for collaborating on software and analysis, but collaborating on data is still an underserved capability. Gavin Mendel-Gleason encountered this problem first hand while working on the Sesshat databank, leading him to create TerminusDB and TerminusHub. In this episode he explains how the TerminusDB system is architected to provide a versioned graph storage engine that ...
Jan 11, 2021•58 min•Ep 167•Transcript available on Metacast Summary As more organizations are gaining experience with data management and incorporating analytics into their decision making, their next move is to adopt machine learning. In order to make those efforts sustainable, the core capability they need is for data scientists and analysts to be able to build and deploy features in a self service manner. As a result the feature store is becoming a required piece of the data platform. To fill that need Kevin Stumpf and the team at Tecton are building ...
Jan 05, 2021•48 min•Ep 166•Transcript available on Metacast Summary One of the core responsibilities of data engineers is to manage the security of the information that they process. The team at Satori has a background in cybersecurity and they are using the lessons that they learned in that field to address the challenge of access control and auditing for data governance. In this episode co-founder and CTO Yoav Cohen explains how the Satori platform provides a proxy layer for your data, the challenges of managing security across disparate storage system...
Dec 28, 2020•34 min•Ep 165•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data governance is a term that encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, both technical and process oriented. One of the more complex aspects is that of access control to the data assets that an organization is responsible for managing. The team at Immuta has built a platform that aims to tackle that problem in a flexible and maintainable fashion so that data teams can easily integrate authorization, data masking, and privacy enhancing technologies into their data infrastructure. In ...
Dec 21, 2020•54 min•Ep 164•Transcript available on Metacast Summary As a data engineer you’re familiar with the process of collecting data from databases, customer data platforms, APIs, etc. At YipitData they rely on a variety of alternative data sources to inform investment decisions by hedge funds and businesses. In this episode Andrew Gross, Bobby Muldoon, and Anup Segu describe the self service data platform that they have built to allow data analysts to own the end-to-end delivery of data projects and how that has allowed them to scale their o...
Dec 15, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep 163•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Building data products are complicated by the fact that there are so many different stakeholders with competing goals and priorities. It is also challenging because of the number of roles and capabilities that are necessary to go from idea to delivery. Different organizations have tried a multitude of organizational strategies to improve the success rate of these data teams with varying levels of success. In this episode Jesse Anderson shares the lessons that he has learned while working...
Dec 07, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Ep 162•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The first stage of every good pipeline is to perform data integration. With the increasing pace of change and the need for up to date analytics the need to integrate that data in near real time is growing. With the improvements and increased variety of options for streaming data engines and improved tools for change data capture it is possible for data teams to make that goal a reality. However, despite all of the tools and managed distributions of those streaming engines it is still a c...
Nov 30, 2020•45 min•Ep 161•Transcript available on Metacast Summary One of the oldest aphorisms about data is "garbage in, garbage out", which is why the current boom in data quality solutions is no surprise. With the growth in projects, platforms, and services that aim to help you establish and maintain control of the health and reliability of your data pipelines it can be overwhelming to stay up to date with how they all compare. In this episode Egor Gryaznov, CTO of Bigeye, joins the show to explore the landscape of data quality companies, t...
Nov 23, 2020•49 min•Ep 160•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The core mission of data engineers is to provide the business with a way to ask and answer questions of their data. This often takes the form of business intelligence dashboards, machine learning models, or APIs on top of a cleaned and curated data set. Despite the rapid progression of impressive tools and products built to fulfill this mission, it is still an uphill battle to tie everything together into a cohesive and reliable platform. At Isima they decided to reimagine the entire eco...
Nov 17, 2020•44 min•Ep 159•Transcript available on Metacast Summary A data catalog is a critical piece of infrastructure for any organization who wants to build analytics products, whether internal or external. While there are a number of platforms available for building that catalog, many of them are either difficult to deploy and integrate, or expensive to use at scale. In this episode Grant Seward explains how he built Tree Schema to be an easy to use and cost effective option for organizations to build their data catalogs. He also shares the internal...
Nov 10, 2020•52 min•Ep 158•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data lakes are gaining popularity due to their flexibility and reduced cost of storage. Along with the benefits there are some additional complexities to consider, including how to safely integrate new data sources or test out changes to existing pipelines. In order to address these challenges the team at Treeverse created LakeFS to introduce version control capabilities to your storage layer. In this episode Einat Orr and Oz Katz explain how they implemented branching and merging capabi...
Nov 03, 2020•50 min•Ep 157•Transcript available on Metacast 
