Summary Spark is a powerful and battle tested framework for building highly scalable data pipelines. Because of its proven ability to handle large volumes of data Capital One has invested in it for their business needs. In this episode Gokul Prabagaren shares his use for it in calculating your rewards points, including the auditing requirements and how he designed his pipeline to maintain all of the necessary information through a pattern of data enrichment. Announcements Hello and welcome to th...
Dec 13, 2021•42 min•Ep 246•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The core to providing your users with excellent service is to understand them and provide a personalized experience. Unfortunately many sites and applications take that to the extreme and collect too much information. In order to make it easier for developers to build customer profiles in a way that respects their privacy Serge Huber helped to create the Apache Unomi framework as an open source customer data platform. In this episode he explains how it can be used to build rich and usefu...
Dec 12, 2021•58 min•Ep 245•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Hiring data professionals is challenging for a multitude of reasons, and as with every interview process there is a potential for bias to creep in. Tim Freestone founded Alooba to provide a more stable reference point for evaluating candidates to ensure that you can make more informed comparisons based on their actual knowledge. In this episode he explains how Alooba got started, how it is being used in the interview process for data oriented roles, and how it can also provide visibility...
Dec 04, 2021•50 min•Ep 244•Transcript available on Metacast Summary A/B testing and experimentation are the most reliable way to determine whether a change to your product will have the desired effect on your business. Unfortunately, being able to design, deploy, and validate experiments is a complex process that requires a mix of technical capacity and organizational involvement which is hard to come by. Chetan Sharma founded Eppo to provide a system that organizations of every scale can use to reduce the burden of managing experiments so that you can f...
Dec 04, 2021•58 min•Ep 243•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The modern data stack has been gaining a lot of attention recently with a rapidly growing set of managed services for different stages of the data lifecycle. With all of the available options it is possible to run a scalable, production grade data platform with a small team, but there are still sharp edges and integration challenges to work through. Peter Fishman and Dan Silberman experienced these difficulties firsthand and created Mozart Data to provide a single, easy to use option for...
Nov 27, 2021•59 min•Ep 242•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The data that you have access to affects the questions that you can answer. By using external data sources you can drastically increase the range of analysis that is available to your organization. The challenge comes in all of the operational aspects of finding, accessing, organizing, and serving that data. In this episode Mark Hookey discusses how he and his team at Demyst do all of the DataOps for external data sources so that you don’t have to, including the systems necessary t...
Nov 27, 2021•59 min•Ep 241•Transcript available on Metacast Summary One of the perennial challenges posed by data lakes is how to keep them up to date as new data is collected. With the improvements in streaming engines it is now possible to perform all of your data integration in near real time, but it can be challenging to understand the proper processing patterns to make that performant. In this episode Ori Rafael shares his experiences from Upsolver and building scalable stream processing for integrating and analyzing data, and what the tradeoffs are...
Nov 20, 2021•53 min•Ep 240•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The technology for scaling storage and processing of data has gone through massive evolution over the past decade, leaving us with the ability to work with massive datasets at the cost of massive complexity. Nick Schrock created the Dagster framework to help tame that complexity and scale the organizational capacity for working with data. In this episode he shares the journey that he and his team at Elementl have taken to understand the state of the ecosystem and how they can provide a f...
Nov 20, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 239•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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 "activi...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep 234•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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 alread...
Oct 23, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 232•Transcript available on Metacast 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 con...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep 231•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Oct 16, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep 230•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Oct 08, 2021•44 min•Ep 228•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Sep 19, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep 222•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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 us...
Sep 04, 2021•1 hr•Ep 218•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 
