Summary Agile methodologies have been adopted by a majority of teams for building software applications. Applying those same practices to data can prove challenging due to the number of systems that need to be included to implement a complete feature. In this episode Shane Gibson shares practical advice and insights from his years of experience as a consultant and engineer working in data about how to adopt agile principles in your data work so that you can move faster and provide more value to ...
Oct 23, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep 336•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The database market has seen unprecedented activity in recent years, with new options addressing a variety of needs being introduced on a nearly constant basis. Despite that, there are a handful of databases that continue to be adopted due to their proven reliability and robust features. MariaDB is one of those default options that has continued to grow and innovate while offering a familiar and stable experience. In this episode field CTO Manjot Singh shares his experiences as an early ...
Oct 23, 2022•52 min•Ep 335•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Logistics and supply chains are under increased stress and scrutiny in recent years. In order to stay ahead of customer demands, businesses need to be able to react quickly and intelligently to changes, which requires fast and accurate insights into their operations. Pathway is a streaming database engine that embeds artificial intelligence into the storage, with functionality designed to support the spatiotemporal data that is crucial for shipping and logistics. In this episode Adrian K...
Oct 16, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 334•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The "data lakehouse" architecture balances the scalability and flexibility of data lakes with the ease of use and transaction support of data warehouses. Dremio is one of the companies leading the development of products and services that support the open lakehouse. In this episode Jason Hughes explains what it means for a lakehouse to be "open" and describes the different components that the Dremio team build and contribute to. Announcements Hello and welcome to the ...
Oct 16, 2022•51 min•Ep 333•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The core of any data platform is the centralized storage and processing layer. For many that is a data warehouse, but in order to support a diverse and constantly changing set of uses and technologies the data lakehouse is a paradigm that offers a useful balance of scale and cost, with performance and ease of use. In order to make the data lakehouse available to a wider audience the team at Iomete built an all-in-one service that handles management and integration of the various technolo...
Oct 10, 2022•55 min•Ep 332•Transcript available on Metacast Summary For any business that wants to stay in operation, the most important thing they can do is understand their customers. American Express has invested substantial time and effort in their Customer 360 product to achieve that understanding. In this episode Purvi Shah, the VP of Enterprise Big Data Platforms at American Express, explains how they have invested in the cloud to power this visibility and the complex suite of integrations they have built and maintained across legacy and modern sy...
Oct 10, 2022•41 min•Ep 331•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The global economy is dependent on complex and dynamic networks of supply chains powered by sophisticated logistics. This requires a significant amount of data to track shipments and operational characteristics of materials and goods. Roambee is a platform that collects, integrates, and analyzes all of that information to provide companies with the critical insights that businesses need to stay running, especially in a time of such constant change. In this episode Roambee CEO, Sanjay Sha...
Oct 03, 2022•1 hr•Ep 330•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data lineage is something that has grown from a convenient feature to a critical need as data systems have grown in scale, complexity, and centrality to business. Alvin is a platform that aims to provide a low effort solution for data lineage capabilities focused on simplifying the work of data engineers. In this episode co-founder Martin Sahlen explains the impact that easy access to lineage information can have on the work of data engineers and analysts, and how he and his team have de...
Oct 03, 2022•56 min•Ep 329•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data integration from source systems to their downstream destinations is the foundational step for any data product. With the increasing expecation for information to be instantly accessible, it drives the need for reliable change data capture. The team at Fivetran have recently introduced that functionality to power real-time data products. In this episode Mark Van de Wiel explains how they integrated CDC functionality into their existing product, discusses the nuances of different appr...
Sep 26, 2022•50 min•Ep 328•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Regardless of how data is being used, it is critical that the information is trusted. The practice of data reliability engineering has gained momentum recently to address that question. To help support the efforts of data teams the folks at Soda Data created the Soda Checks Language and the corresponding Soda Core utility that acts on this new DSL. In this episode Tom Baeyens explains their reasons for creating a new syntax for expressing and validating checks for data assets and process...
Sep 26, 2022•41 min•Ep 327•Transcript available on Metacast Summary There is a constant tension in business data between growing siloes, and breaking them down. Even when a tool is designed to integrate information as a guard against data isolation, it can easily become a silo of its own, where you have to make a point of using it to seek out information. In order to help distribute critical context about data assets and their status into the locations where work is being done Nicholas Freund co-founded Workstream. In this episode he discusses the challe...
Sep 19, 2022•55 min•Ep 326•Transcript available on Metacast Summary In order to improve efficiency in any business you must first know what is contributing to wasted effort or missed opportunities. When your business operates across multiple locations it becomes even more challenging and important to gain insights into how work is being done. In this episode Tommy Yionoulis shares his experiences working in the service and hospitality industries and how that led him to found OpsAnalitica, a platform for collecting and analyzing metrics on multi location ...
Sep 19, 2022•2 hr 32 min•Ep 325•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data engineering systems are complex and interconnected with myriad and often opaque chains of dependencies. As they scale, the problems of visibility and dependency management can increase at an exponential rate. In order to turn this into a tractable problem one approach is to define and enforce contracts between producers and consumers of data. Ananth Packildurai created Schemata as a way to make the creation of schema contracts a lightweight process, allowing the dependency chains to...
Sep 12, 2022•1 hr•Ep 324•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Any business that wants to understand their operations and customers through data requires some form of pipeline. Building reliable data pipelines is a complex and costly undertaking with many layered requirements. In order to reduce the amount of time and effort required to build pipelines that power critical insights Manish Jethani co-founded Hevo Data. In this episode he shares his journey from building a consumer product to launching a data pipeline service and how his frustrations a...
Sep 12, 2022•57 min•Ep 323•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The global climate impacts everyone, and the rate of change introduces many questions that businesses need to consider. Getting answers to those questions is challenging, because the climate is a multidimensional and constantly evolving system. Sust Global was created to provide curated data sets for organizations to be able to analyze climate information in the context of their business needs. In this episode Gopal Erinjippurath discusses the data engineering challenges of building and ...
Sep 05, 2022•54 min•Ep 322•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data observability is a product category that has seen massive growth and adoption in recent years. Monte Carlo is in the vanguard of companies who have been enabling data teams to observe and understand their complex data systems. In this episode founders Barr Moses and Lior Gavish rejoin the show to reflect on the evolution and adoption of data observability technologies and the capabilities that are being introduced as the broader ecosystem adopts the practices. Announcements Hello an...
Sep 05, 2022•59 min•Ep 321•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The dream of every engineer is to automate all of their tasks. For data engineers, this is a monumental undertaking. Orchestration engines are one step in that direction, but they are not a complete solution. In this episode Sean Knapp shares his views on what constitutes proper automation and the work that he and his team at Ascend are doing to help make it a reality. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re...
Aug 29, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep 320•Transcript available on Metacast Summary AirBnB pioneered a number of the organizational practices that have become the goal of modern data teams. Out of that culture a number of successful businesses were created to provide the tools and methods to a broader audience. In this episode several almuni of AirBnB’s formative years who have gone on to found their own companies join the show to reflect on their shared successes, missed opportunities, and lessons learned. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering P...
Aug 28, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep 319•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The position of Chief Data Officer (CDO) is relatively new in the business world and has not been universally adopted. As a result, not everyone understands what the responsibilities of the role are, when you need one, and how to hire for it. In this episode Tracy Daniels, CDO of Truist, shares her journey into the position, her responsibilities, and her relationship to the data professionals in her organization. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show a...
Aug 22, 2022•47 min•Ep 318•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data has permeated every aspect of our lives and the products that we interact with. As a result, end users and customers have come to expect interactions and updates with services and analytics to be fast and up to date. In this episode Shruti Bhat gives her view on the state of the ecosystem for real-time data and the work that she and her team at Rockset is doing to make it easier for engineers to build those experiences. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast...
Aug 22, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep 317•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data engineers have typically left the process of data labeling to data scientists or other roles because of its nature as a manual and process heavy undertaking, focusing instead on building automation and repeatable systems. Watchful is a platform to make labeling a repeatable and scalable process that relies on codifying domain expertise. In this episode founder Shayan Mohanty explains how he and his team are bringing software best practices and automation to the world of machine lear...
Aug 14, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Ep 316•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data is useless if it isn’t being used, and you can’t use it if you don’t know where it is. Data catalogs were the first solution to this problem, but they are only helpful if you know what you are looking for. In this episode Shinji Kim discusses the challenges of data discovery and how to collect and preserve additional context about each piece of information so that you can find what you need when you don’t even know what you’re looking for yet. Announcem...
Aug 14, 2022•53 min•Ep 315•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data mesh is a frequent topic of conversation in the data community, with many debates about how and when to employ this architectural pattern. The team at AgileLab have first-hand experience helping large enterprise organizations evaluate and implement their own data mesh strategies. In this episode Paolo Platter shares the lessons they have learned in that process, the Data Mesh Boost platform that they have built to reduce some of the boilerplate required to make it successful, and so...
Aug 06, 2022•49 min•Ep 314•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The optimal format for storage and retrieval of data is dependent on how it is going to be used. For analytical systems there are decades of investment in data warehouses and various modeling techniques. For machine learning applications relational models require additional processing to be directly useful, which is why there has been a growth in the use of vector databases. These platforms store direct representations of the vector embeddings that machine learning models rely on for com...
Aug 06, 2022•59 min•Ep 313•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Exploratory data analysis works best when the feedback loop is fast and iterative. This is easy to achieve when you are working on small datasets, but as they scale up beyond what can fit on a single machine those short iterations quickly become long and tedious. The Arkouda project is a Python interface built on top of the Chapel compiler to bring back those interactive speeds for exploratory analysis on horizontally scalable compute that parallelizes operations on large volumes of data...
Jul 31, 2022•41 min•Ep 312•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data lineage is the roadmap for your data platform, providing visibility into all of the dependencies for any report, machine learning model, or data warehouse table that you are working with. Because of its centrality to your data systems it is valuable for debugging, governance, understanding context, and myriad other purposes. This means that it is important to have an accurate and complete lineage graph so that you don’t have to perform your own detective work when time is in s...
Jul 31, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep 311•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data engineering is a difficult job, requiring a large number of skills that often don’t overlap. Any effort to understand how to start a career in the role has required stitching together information from a multitude of resources that might not all agree with each other. In order to provide a single reference for anyone tasked with data engineering responsibilities Joe Reis and Matt Housley took it upon themselves to write the book "Fundamentals of Data Engineering". In ...
Jul 24, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 309•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The current stage of evolution in the data management ecosystem has resulted in domain and use case specific orchestration capabilities being incorporated into various tools. This complicates the work involved in making end-to-end workflows visible and integrated. Dagster has invested in bringing insights about external tools’ dependency graphs into one place through its "software defined assets" functionality. In this episode Nick Schrock discusses the importance of orch...
Jul 24, 2022•58 min•Ep 310•Transcript available on Metacast Summary There are extensive and valuable data sets that are available outside the bounds of your organization. Whether that data is public, paid, or scraped it requires investment and upkeep to acquire and integrate it with your systems. Crux was built to reduce the total cost of acquisition and ownership for integrating external data, offering a fully managed service for delivering those data assets in the manner that best suits your infrastructure. In this episode Crux CTO Mark Etherington dis...
Jul 17, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep 307•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data engineering is a large and growing subject, with new technologies, specializations, and "best practices" emerging at an accelerating pace. This podcast does its best to explore this fractal ecosystem, and has been at it for the past 5+ years. In this episode Joe Reis, founder of Ternary Data and co-author of "Fundamentals of Data Engineering", turns the tables and interviews the host, Tobias Macey, about his journey into podcasting, how he runs the show behind th...
Jul 17, 2022•57 min•Ep 308•Transcript available on Metacast 
