The Drill to Detail Podcast returns for a new series with our host, Mark Rittman, joined by Lloyd Tabb, Founder CTO and Chairman of Looker to talk about the foundational story of Looker and LookML, query latency and semantic models, analytic engines and code IDEs, analytics developer workflows and the rise of cloud elastically-scalable databases, packaged applications and embedded analytics and why learning (and loving) are the long-term keys to analytics and business success. Looker JOIN: The T...
Mar 05, 2019•36 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined in this Looker JOIN 2018 Special by long-term friends of the show Tristan Handy from Fishtown Analytics, and Stewart Bryson from Red Pill Analytics to talk about dbt and enabling data engineering for data analysts; the state of modern data analytics consulting today, and what we’re looking forward to hearing about at next week’s Looker JOIN 2018 conference in San Francisco, CA. Looker JOIN 2018, San Francisco dbt (data build tool) “Future Proof your Analytics Stack”...
Oct 02, 2018•45 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Jonathan Palmer from King Games to talk about the role of analytics in the development of Candy Crush Saga and other King games, their use of Looker along with Google BigQuery and Exasol to provide analytics capabilities to their game designers and product owners and his approach to doing all of this in a fast-moving, technology-driven internet business. - Candy Crush Saga article on Wikipedia - King Games company website - “How King Games is Crushing Ga...
Jul 03, 2018•46 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined by Neil Barton, Chief Technology Officer at WhereScape to talk about metadata-driven data warehouse design, automating the build and management of data warehouse infrastructure and the thinking behind his company's WhereScape Red and WhereScape 3D tools.
Jun 18, 2018•36 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast In this specially-extended episode just before ODTUG KScope'18, Mark Rittman is joined by Matt Yorke from Qubix to talk about Oracle Essbase Cloud, Oracle Analytics Cloud and the business of Oracle Cloud analytics consulting Essbase Cloud is Here! Oracle Analytics Partner Forum 2018 Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud ODTUG KScope’18 Matt Yorke on LinkedIn...
Jun 04, 2018•1 hr 21 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined by Yali Sassoon from Snowplow to talk about data pipelines and Hadoop in the cloud; how web analytics evolved from counting pageviews to today's event-level analysis of consumer behavoir across all digital channels; why digital analytics is hard but interesting; and Snowplow's approach to building a successful hybrid open-source/commercial software business that competes successfully with megavendors such as Google and Adobe. Snowplow website Snowplow Insights commercial h...
May 21, 2018•49 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Greg Michaelson from DataRobot, talking about the benefits of automating the discovery and automation of analytics and machine learning in financial services and other industries. DataRobot: Automated Machine Learning for Predictive Modeling DataRobot for Business Analysts Automated Machine Learning Drives Intelligent Business (Jen Underwood, Information Week article) Marketing Attribution, Artificial Intelligence, and Game Theory Greg Michaelson LinkedI...
May 10, 2018•51 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined by ThoughtSpot's Chief Data Evangelist Doug Bordonaro to talk about the value of data, issues around trust and consent raised by the EU's new GDPR regulations, and how ThoughtSpot are applying ideas from search engines combined with artificial intelligence smarts to surface insights and drive real value for business users from their analytics investment. Value Becomes the 5th “V” in Big Data Factors ThoughtSpot - Search and AI-Driven Analytics for Humans The ThoughtSpot Bl...
Apr 23, 2018•40 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Grover LinkedIn Profile and Github Profile "Hadoop Application Architectures" "Drill to Detail Ep. 7 'Apache Spark and Hadoop Application Architectures' Lyft Engineering Blog "Software Engineer to Product Manager" blog by Gwen Shapira "Introduction to the Oracle Data Integrator Topology" from the Oracle Data Integrator docs site Apache Airflow and Amazon Kinesis homepages "Experimentation in a Ridesharing Marketplace" by Nicholas Chamandy, Head of Data Science at Lyft "How Uber...
Apr 09, 2018•49 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined by Special Guest Fangjin Yang to talk about the history of Druid, a high-performance, column-oriented, distributed data store originally developed by the team at Metamarkets to provide fast ad-hoc access to large amounts of event-level marketing data, and his work at Imply to commercialise Druid and build a suite of supporting query and data management tools. Druid project homepage Druid - A Real-Time Analytical Data Store (pdf) Druid - Learning about the Druid...
Mar 13, 2018•36 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined in this 50th Episode Special by our original guest on the first episode of Drill to Detail, Stewart Bryson, to talk about developing agile BI applications using FiveTran, SnowflakeDB and Looker and his recent work developing a BI solution for Google Play Marketing using Google Data Studio and Google Cloud Platform. We're also joined later in the show by Alex Gorbachev from Pythian, our mystery guest who Stewart then interviews flawlessly armed only with a set of questions ...
Feb 27, 2018•1 hr 10 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined by Will Davis from Trifacta to talk about the public beta of Google Cloud Dataprep, Trifacta's data wrangling platform and topics including metadata management, data quality and data management for big data and cloud data sources. Google Cloud Dataprep on Google Cloud Platform "Google Cloud Dataprep: Spreadsheet-Style Data Wrangling Powered by Google Cloud Dataflow" "A New Cloud-Based Data Prep Solution from Google & Trifacta" Trifacta website "A Breakthrough Approach ...
Feb 05, 2018•46 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast - Oracle Designer page on Oracle.com - Bitmap Index page on Wikipedia - Mondrian project page on Github - Mondrian OLAP Server page on Wikipedia - MultiDimensional eXpressions (MDX) page on Wikipedia - Julian Hyde blog - Apache Calcite project homepage - Apache Calcite Introduction and Overview deck - Streaming SQL presentation at Apex Big Data World 2017, Mountain View, California...
Jan 23, 2018•1 hr 2 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Mark is joined by long-term industry veteran and friend Christian Berg to talk about surviving fifteen years as a contractor in analytics industry, changes he's seen in the market and in how project are approached, the value in getting involved in the community, and in a specially extended Christmas and New Year edition we look back at what was topical in 2017 and what are Christian's predictions for 2018 ... and appoint Christian as Head of our Best Practices Found on the Internet.
Dec 26, 2017•2 hr 45 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined in this episode of Drill to Detail by Dr. Carsten Bange from BARC to talk about findings from the recently completed BI Survey 17 including the continuing move to modern BI platforms and self-service desktop tools, analytics adoption trends and the increasing incorporation of BI functionality within business applications, the surprising topicality of master data management and data governance ... and whatever happened to Nigel Pendse and his legendary OLAP Report?
Dec 19, 2017•55 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by returning special guest Jen Underwood to talk about what's new and innovative in the BI and analytics industry right now, and how AI and machine learning are this year's data discovery and data visualization.
Dec 13, 2017•58 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Mark is joined in this episode of Drill to Detail by Wes McKinney, to talk about the origins of the Python Pandas open-source package for data analysis and his subsequent work as a contributor to the Kudu (incubating) and Parquet projects within the Apache Software Foundation and Arrow, an in-memory data structure specification for use by engineers building data systems and the de-facto standard for columnar in-memory processing and interchange.
Dec 08, 2017•47 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast Mark is joined by Mike Durran from the Oracle Analytics Product Management team in this UKOUG Tech’17 special to talk about his route into product management via the Oracle Discoverer BI tool, Oracle’s latest product in this space Oracle Data Visualization Desktop 4 and its new features, and Mike’s upcoming sessions at the UK Oracle User Group’s Tech’17 event next week in Birmingham, UK.
Nov 30, 2017•53 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast Mark is joined in this episode by Avi Zloof from Evaluex to talk about the new world of elastically-provisioned cloud-hosted analytic databases such as Google BigQuery and Amazon Athena, how their pricing model and vendor strategy differs from the traditional database vendors, and how machine learning can be used to automate performance tuning and optimize workloads in this new world of large-scale distributed query and storage.
Nov 12, 2017•44 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Drill to Detail Ep.41 'Developing with Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Platform' With Special Guest Felipe Hoffa Mark is joined in this episode by Google Cloud Platform Developer Advocate Felipe Hoffa, talking about getting started as a developer using Google BigQuery along with Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Dataprep and Google Cloud Platform's machine learning APIs.
Oct 30, 2017•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Taylor Brown from Fivetran to talk about middleware for SaaS data, their focus on integrations with SaaS vendors and how this differentiates their offering, his thoughts on packaged analytic applications announced at the recent Looker Join conference ... and where the name "FiveTran" came from.
Oct 16, 2017•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Oct 03, 2017•Transcript available on Metacast Drill to Detail returns for a new season with special guest Jean-Pierre Dijcks, to talk about Oracle's Big Data Strategy now and in the past, thoughts on distributed query and storage in the cloud, and previewing themes and announcements to look forward to at the upcoming Oracle Open World 2017 event running in San Francisco next month.
Sep 19, 2017•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined in this Summer Special episode by none other than Cameron Lackpour, Essbase expert and Oracle ACE Director, to talk about why and how Essbase won the OLAP wars, how Essbase Server works and the role it now plays in Oracle Analytics Cloud and his involvement with user groups over the years. In this specially extended edition he also gives us his reading recommendations for while you're at the pool or, as he will be, out camping, and he also shares his predictions for what w...
Aug 01, 2017•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined by Industry Analyst Mark Madsen to talk about marketing analytics and the rise of the omni-channel consumer, the use of AI in analytics and personalization and what this all means for brands, for advertisers and for marketers.
Jul 24, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode Mark is joined by Jake Stein to talk about Stitch Data and their ETL tool for data engineers, the new open-source project Singer and his experiences building a software startup that both partners and competes with the big cloud platform vendors.
Jul 17, 2017•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Rittman is joined by Donald Farmer to talk about his work at Microsoft on SQL Server Analysis Services and Integration Services, why he moved to Qlik and the challenges of evolving a BI product strategy from focusing on desktops to focusing on the enterprise, and some advice for customers, software vendors and partners working with data and analytics tools.
Jul 12, 2017•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode Mark is joined by Tristan Handy from Fishtown Analytics to talk about building-out analytics functions in high-growth startups and three related blog posts on this topic.
Jul 03, 2017•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark is joined by Qubit colleague Will Browne to talk about his recent academic paper co-authored with Mike Swarbrick Jones on what techniques are most successful in influencing and retaining eCommerce customers, using analytics and statistical analysis-at-scale to analyze and understand 20 billion user journeys held in Qubit's Google Cloud Platform-hosted Customer Data Store.
Jun 26, 2017•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark is joined by returning special guest Dan McClary to talk about data modeling and database design on distributed query engines such as Google BigQuery, the underlying Dremel technology and Capacitor storage format that enables this cloud distributed data warehouse-as-a-service platform to scale to petabyte-size tables spanning tens of thousands of servers, and techniques to optimize BigQuery table joins using nested fields, table partitioning and denormalization .
Jun 19, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
