Summary Building a data platform is a journey, not a destination. Beyond the work of assembling a set of technologies and building integrations across them, there is also the work of growing and organizing a team that can support and benefit from that platform. In this episode Inbar Yogev and Lior Winner share the journey that they and their teams at Riskified have been on for their data platform. They also discuss how they have established a guild system for training and supporting data profess...
Jul 10, 2022•40 min•Ep 306•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Building and maintaining reliable data assets is the prime directive for data engineers. While it is easy to say, it is endlessly complex to implement, requiring data professionals to be experts in a wide range of disparate topics while designing and implementing complex topologies of information workflows. In order to make this a tractable problem it is essential that engineers embrace automation at every opportunity. In this episode Chris Riccomini shares his experiences building and s...
Jul 10, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep 305•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The perennial challenge of data engineers is ensuring that information is integrated reliably. While it is straightforward to know whether a synchronization process succeeded, it is not always clear whether every record was copied correctly. In order to quickly identify if and how two data systems are out of sync Gleb Mezhanskiy and Simon Eskildsen partnered to create the open source data-diff utility. In this episode they explain how the utility is implemented to run quickly and how you...
Jul 03, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep 304•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The ecosystem for data tools has been going through rapid and constant evolution over the past several years. These technological shifts have brought about corresponding changes in data and platform architectures for managing data and analytical workflows. In this episode Colleen Tartow shares her insights into the motivating factors and benefits of the most prominent patterns that are in the popular narrative; data mesh and the modern data stack. She also discusses her views on the role...
Jul 03, 2022•59 min•Ep 303•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The proliferation of sensors and GPS devices has dramatically increased the number of applications for spatial data, and the need for scalable geospatial analytics. In order to reduce the friction involved in aggregating disparate data sets that share geographic similarities the Unfolded team built a platform that supports working across raster, vector, and tabular data in a single system. In this episode Isaac Brodsky explains how the Unfolded platform is architected, their experience j...
Jun 27, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep 301•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The most complicated part of data engineering is the effort involved in making the raw data fit into the narrative of the business. Master Data Management (MDM) is the process of building consensus around what the information actually means in the context of the business and then shaping the data to match those semantics. In this episode Malcolm Hawker shares his years of experience working in this domain to explore the combination of technical and social skills that are necessary to mak...
Jun 27, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep 302•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data analysis is a valuable exercise that is often out of reach of non-technical users as a result of the complexity of data systems. In order to lower the barrier to entry Ryan Buick created the Canvas application with a spreadsheet oriented workflow that is understandable to a wide audience. In this episode Ryan explains how he and his team have designed their platform to bring everyone onto a level playing field and the benefits that it provides to the organization. Announcements Hell...
Jun 19, 2022•43 min•Ep 300•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Metadata is the lifeblood of your data platform, providing information about what is happening in your systems. A variety of platforms have been developed to capture and analyze that information to great effect, but they are inherently limited in their utility due to their nature as storage systems. In order to level up their value a new trend of active metadata is being implemented, allowing use cases like keeping BI reports up to date, auto-scaling your warehouses, and automated data g...
Jun 19, 2022•53 min•Ep 299•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Building a well rounded and effective data team is an iterative process, and the first hire can set the stage for future success or failure. Trupti Natu has been the first data hire multiple times and gone through the process of building teams across the different stages of growth. In this episode she shares her thoughts and insights on how to be intentional about establishing your own data team. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data ...
Jun 13, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 297•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Unstructured data takes many forms in an organization. From a data engineering perspective that often means things like JSON files, audio or video recordings, images, etc. Another category of unstructured data that every business deals with is PDFs, Word documents, workstation backups, and countless other types of information. Aparavi was created to tame the sprawl of information across machines, datacenters, and clouds so that you can reduce the amount of duplicate data and save time an...
Jun 13, 2022•49 min•Ep 298•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The best way to make sure that you don’t leak sensitive data is to never have it in the first place. The team at Skyflow decided that the second best way is to build a storage system dedicated to securely managing your sensitive information and making it easy to integrate with your applications and data systems. In this episode Sean Falconer explains the idea of a data privacy vault and how this new architectural element can drastically reduce the potential for making a mistake wit...
Jun 06, 2022•54 min•Ep 296•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Cloud services have made highly scalable and performant data platforms economical and manageable for data teams. However, they are still challenging to work with and manage for anyone who isn’t in a technical role. Hung Dang understood the need to make data more accessible to the entire organization and created Y42 as a better user experience on top of the "modern data stack". In this episode he shares how he designed the platform to support the full spectrum of technical...
Jun 06, 2022•59 min•Ep 295•Transcript available on Metacast Summary A large fraction of data engineering work involves moving data from one storage location to another in order to support different access and query patterns. Singlestore aims to cut down on the number of database engines that you need to run so that you can reduce the amount of copying that is required. By supporting fast, in-memory row-based queries and columnar on-disk representation, it lets your transactional and analytical workloads run in the same database. In this episode SVP of en...
May 30, 2022•41 min•Ep 294•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The latest generation of data warehouse platforms have brought unprecedented operational simplicity and effectively infinite scale. Along with those benefits, they have also introduced a new consumption model that can lead to incredibly expensive bills at the end of the month. In order to ensure that you can explore and analyze your data without spending money on inefficient queries Mingsheng Hong and Zheng Shao created Bluesky Data. In this episode they explain how their platform optimi...
May 30, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 293•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The interfaces and design cues that a tool offers can have a massive impact on who is able to use it and the tasks that they are able to perform. With an eye to making data workflows more accessible to everyone in an organization Raj Bains and his team at Prophecy designed a powerful and extensible low-code platform that lets technical and non-technical users scale data flows without forcing everyone into the same layers of abstraction. In this episode he explores the tension between cod...
May 23, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep 292•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Machine learning has become a meaningful target for data applications, bringing with it an increase in the complexity of orchestrating the entire data flow. Flyte is a project that was started at Lyft to address their internal needs for machine learning and integrated closely with Kubernetes as the execution manager. In this episode Ketan Umare and Haytham Abuelfutuh share the story of the Flyte project and how their work at Union is focused on supporting and scaling the code and communi...
May 23, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep 291•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Industrial applications are one of the primary adopters of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, with business critical operations being informed by data collected across a fleet of sensors. Vopak is a business that manages storage and distribution of a variety of liquids that are critical to the modern world, and they have recently launched a new platform to gain more utility from their industrial sensors. In this episode Mário Pereira shares the system design that he and his team have...
May 16, 2022•48 min•Ep 289•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Designing a data platform is a complex and iterative undertaking which requires accounting for many conflicting needs. Designing a platform that relies on a data lake as its central architectural tenet adds additional layers of difficulty. Srivatsan Sridharan has had the opportunity to design, build, and run data lake platforms for both Yelp and Robinhood, with many valuable lessons learned from each experience. In this episode he shares his insights and advice on how to approach such an...
May 16, 2022•58 min•Ep 290•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Dan Delorey helped to build the core technologies of Google’s cloud data services for many years before embarking on his latest adventure as the VP of Data at SoFi. From being an early engineer on the Dremel project, to helping launch and manage BigQuery, on to helping enterprises adopt Google’s data products he learned all of the critical details of how to run services used by data platform teams. Now he is the consumer of many of the tools that his work inspired. In this ep...
May 09, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 287•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Many of the events, ideas, and objects that we try to represent through data have a high degree of connectivity in the real world. These connections are best represented and analyzed as graphs to provide efficient and accurate analysis of their relationships. TigerGraph is a leading database that offers a highly scalable and performant native graph engine for powering graph analytics and machine learning. In this episode Jon Herke shares how TigerGraph customers are taking advantage of t...
May 09, 2022•40 min•Ep 288•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 
