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Data Engineering Podcast

Data Engineering Podcast

511 episodes — Page 6 of 11

Ep 260A Reflection On Learning A Lot More Than 97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know

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Summary The Data Engineering Podcast has been going for five years now and has included conversations and interviews with a huge number of guests, covering a broad range of topics. In addition to that, the host curated the essays contained in the book "97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know", using the knowledge and context gained from running the show to inform the selection process. In this episode he shares some reflections on producing the podcast, compiling the book, and relevant trends in the ecosystem of data engineering. He also provides some advice for those who are early in their career of data engineering and looking to advance in their roles. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m doing something a bit different. I’m going to talk about some of the lessons that I have learned while running the podcast, compiling the book "97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know", and some of the themes that I’ve observed throughout. Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Overview of the 97 things book How the project came about Goals of the book What are the paths into data engineering? What are some of the macroscopic themes in the industry? What are some of the microscopic details that are useful/necessary to succeed as a data engineer? What are some of the career/team/organizational details that are helpful for data engineers? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected outcomes/feedback that I have seen from running the podcast and working on the book? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that I have learned while working on the Data Engineering Podcast and 97 things book? What do I have planned for the future of the podcast? Contact Info LinkedIn Email Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links 97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know Buy on Amazon (affiliate link) Read on O’Reilly Learning O’Reilly Learning 30 Day Free Trial Podcast.__init__ Pipeline Academy data engineering bootcamp Podcast Episode Hadoop Object Relational Mapper (ORM) Singer Podcast Episode Airbyte Podcast Episode Data Mesh Podcast Episode Data Contracts Episode Designing Data Intensive Applications Data Council 2022 Conference Data Engineering Weekly Newsletter Data Mesh Learning MLOps Community Analytics Engineering Newsletter The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestr

Jan 31, 202241 min

Ep 259Effective Pandas Patterns For Data Engineering

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Summary Pandas is a powerful tool for cleaning, transforming, manipulating, or enriching data, among many other potential uses. As a result it has become a standard tool for data engineers for a wide range of applications. Matt Harrison is a Python expert with a long history of working with data who now spends his time on consulting and training. He recently wrote a book on effective patterns for Pandas code, and in this episode he shares advice on how to write efficient data processing routines that will scale with your data volumes, while being understandable and maintainable. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Today’s episode is Sponsored by Prophecy.io – the low-code data engineering platform for the cloud. Prophecy provides an easy-to-use visual interface to design & deploy data pipelines on Apache Spark & Apache Airflow. Now all the data users can use software engineering best practices – git, tests and continuous deployment with a simple to use visual designer. How does it work? – You visually design the pipelines, and Prophecy generates clean Spark code with tests on git; then you visually schedule these pipelines on Airflow. You can observe your pipelines with built in metadata search and column level lineage. Finally, if you have existing workflows in AbInitio, Informatica or other ETL formats that you want to move to the cloud, you can import them automatically into Prophecy making them run productively on Spark. Create your free account today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prophecy. The only thing worse than having bad data is not knowing that you have it. With Bigeye’s data observability platform, if there is an issue with your data or data pipelines you’ll know right away and can get it fixed before the business is impacted. Bigeye let’s data teams measure, improve, and communicate the quality of your data to company stakeholders. With complete API access, a user-friendly interface, and automated yet flexible alerting, you’ve got everything you need to establish and maintain trust in your data. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/bigeye today to sign up and start trusting your analyses. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Matt Harrison about useful tips for using Pandas for data engineering projects Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What are the main tasks that you have seen Pandas used for in a data engineering context? What are some of the common mistakes that can lead to poor performance when scaling to large data sets? What are some of the utility features that you have found most helpful for data processing? One of the interesting add-ons to Pandas is its integration with Arrow. What are some of the considerations for how and when to use the Arrow capabilities vs. out-of-the-box Pandas? Pandas is a tool that spans data processing and data science. What are some of the ways that data engineers should think about writing their code to make it accessible to data scientists for supporting collaboration across data workflows? Pandas is often used for transformation logic. What are some of the ways that engineers should approach the design of their code to make it understandable and maintainable? How can data engineers support testing their transformations? There are a number of projects that aim to scale Pandas logic across cores and clusters. What are some of the considerations for when to use one of these tools, and how to select the proper framework? (e.g. Dask, Modin, Ray, etc.) What are some anti-patterns that engineers should guard against when using Pandas for data processing? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Pandas used for data processing? When is Pandas the wrong choice for data processing? What are some of the projects related to Pandas that you are keeping an eye on? Contact Info @__mharrison__ on Twitter metasnake Effective Pandas Bundle (affiliate link with 20% discount code applied) Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to ch

Jan 31, 20221h 0m

Ep 257Building And Managing Data Teams And Data Platforms In Large Organizations With Ashish Mrig

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Summary Data engineering is a relatively young and rapidly expanding field, with practitioners having a wide array of experiences as they navigate their careers. Ashish Mrig currently leads the data analytics platform for Wayfair, as well as running a local data engineering meetup. In this episode he shares his career journey, the challenges related to management of data professionals, and the platform design that he and his team have built to power analytics at a large company. He also provides some excellent insights into the factors that play into the build vs. buy decision at different organizational sizes. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Today’s episode is Sponsored by Prophecy.io – the low-code data engineering platform for the cloud. Prophecy provides an easy-to-use visual interface to design & deploy data pipelines on Apache Spark & Apache Airflow. Now all the data users can use software engineering best practices – git, tests and continuous deployment with a simple to use visual designer. How does it work? – You visually design the pipelines, and Prophecy generates clean Spark code with tests on git; then you visually schedule these pipelines on Airflow. You can observe your pipelines with built in metadata search and column level lineage. Finally, if you have existing workflows in AbInitio, Informatica or other ETL formats that you want to move to the cloud, you can import them automatically into Prophecy making them run productively on Spark. Create your free account today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prophecy. The only thing worse than having bad data is not knowing that you have it. With Bigeye’s data observability platform, if there is an issue with your data or data pipelines you’ll know right away and can get it fixed before the business is impacted. Bigeye let’s data teams measure, improve, and communicate the quality of your data to company stakeholders. With complete API access, a user-friendly interface, and automated yet flexible alerting, you’ve got everything you need to establish and maintain trust in your data. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/bigeye today to sign up and start trusting your analyses. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ashish Mrig about his path as a data engineer Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? You currently lead a data engineering team at a relatively large company. What are the topics that account for the majority of your time and energy? What are some of the most valuable lessons that you’ve learned about managing and motivating teams of data professionals? What has been your most consistent challenge across the different generations of the data ecosystem? How is your current data platform architected? Given the current state of the technology and services landscape, how would you approach the design and implementation of a greenfield rebuild of your platform? What are some of the pitfalls that you have seen data teams encounter most frequently? You are running a data engineering meetup for your local community in the Boston area. What have been some of the recurring themes that are discussed in those events? Contact Info Medium Blog LinkedIn Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Links Wayfair Tivo InfluxDB Podcast Interview BigQuery AtScale Podcast Episode Data Engineering Boston The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Jan 23, 202252 min

Ep 258The Importance Of Data Contracts As The Interface For Data Integration With Abhi Sivasailam

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Summary Data platforms are exemplified by a complex set of connections that are subject to a set of constantly evolving requirements. In order to make this a tractable problem it is necessary to define boundaries for communication between concerns, which brings with it the need to establish interface contracts for communicating across those boundaries. The recent move toward the data mesh as a formalized architecture that builds on this design provides the language that data teams need to make this a more organized effort. In this episode Abhi Sivasailam shares his experience designing and implementing a data mesh solution with his team at Flexport, and the importance of defining and enforcing data contracts that are implemented at those domain boundaries. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Abhi Sivasailam about the different social and technical interfaces available for defining and enforcing data contracts Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what your working definition of a "data contract" is? What are the goals and purpose of these contracts? What are the locations and methods of defining a data contract? What kind of information needs to be encoded in a contract definition? How do you manage enforcement of contracts? manifestations of contracts in data mesh implementation ergonomics (technical and social) of data contracts and how to prevent them from prohibiting productivity What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected approaches to data contracts that you have seen? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on data contract implementation? When are data contracts the wrong choice? Contact Info LinkedIn @_abhisivasailam on Twitter Website Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Links

Jan 23, 202256 min

Ep 256Automated Data Quality Management Through Machine Learning With Anomalo

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Summary Data quality control is a requirement for being able to trust the various reports and machine learning models that are relying on the information that you curate. Rules based systems are useful for validating known requirements, but with the scale and complexity of data in modern organizations it is impractical, and often impossible, to manually create rules for all potential errors. The team at Anomalo are building a machine learning powered platform for identifying and alerting on anomalous and invalid changes in your data so that you aren’t flying blind. In this episode founders Elliot Shmukler and Jeremy Stanley explain how they have architected the system to work with your data warehouse and let you know about the critical issues hiding in your data without overwhelming you with alerts. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription The only thing worse than having bad data is not knowing that you have it. With Bigeye’s data observability platform, if there is an issue with your data or data pipelines you’ll know right away and can get it fixed before the business is impacted. Bigeye let’s data teams measure, improve, and communicate the quality of your data to company stakeholders. With complete API access, a user-friendly interface, and automated yet flexible alerting, you’ve got everything you need to establish and maintain trust in your data. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/bigeye today to sign up and start trusting your analyses. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Elliot Shmukler and Jeremy Stanley about Anomalo, a data quality platform aiming to automate issue detection with zero setup Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Anomalo is and the story behind it? Managing data quality is ostensibly about building trust in your data. What are the promises that data teams are able to make about the information in their control when they are using Anomalo? What are some of the claims that cannot be made unequivocally when relying on data quality monitoring systems? types of data quality issues identified utility of automated vs programmatic tests Can you describe how the Anomalo system is designed and implemented? How have the design and goals of the platform changed or evolved since you started working on it? What is your approach for validating changes to the business logic in your platform given the unpredictable nature of the system under test? model training/customization process statistical model seasonality/windowing CI/CD With any monitoring system the most challenging thing to do is avoid generating alerts that aren’t actionable or helpful. What is your strategy for helping your customers avoid alert fatigue? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Anomalo used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Anomalo? When is Anomalo the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Anomalo? Contact Info Elliot LinkedIn @eshmu on Twitter Jeremy LinkedIn @jeremystan on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a pro

Jan 15, 20221h 2m

Ep 255An Introduction To Data And Analytics Engineering For Non-Programmers

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Summary Applications of data have grown well beyond the venerable business intelligence dashboards that organizations have relied on for decades. Now it is being used to power consumer facing services, influence organizational behaviors, and build sophisticated machine learning systems. Given this increased level of importance it has become necessary for everyone in the business to treat data as a product in the same way that software applications have driven the early 2000s. In this episode Brian McMillan shares his work on the book "Building Data Products" and how he is working to educate business users and data professionals about the combination of technical, economical, and business considerations that need to be blended for these projects to succeed. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Today’s episode is Sponsored by Prophecy.io – the low-code data engineering platform for the cloud. Prophecy provides an easy-to-use visual interface to design & deploy data pipelines on Apache Spark & Apache Airflow. Now all the data users can use software engineering best practices – git, tests and continuous deployment with a simple to use visual designer. How does it work? – You visually design the pipelines, and Prophecy generates clean Spark code with tests on git; then you visually schedule these pipelines on Airflow. You can observe your pipelines with built in metadata search and column level lineage. Finally, if you have existing workflows in AbInitio, Informatica or other ETL formats that you want to move to the cloud, you can import them automatically into Prophecy making them run productively on Spark. Create your free account today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prophecy. StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Brian McMillan about building data products and his book to introduce the work of data analysts and engineers to non-programmers Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what motivated you to write a book about the work of building data products? Who is your target audience? What are the main goals that you are trying to achieve through the book? What was your approach for determining the structure and contents of the book? What are the core principles of data engineering that have remained from the original wave of ETL tools and rigid data warehouses? What are some of the new foundational elements of data products that need to be codified for the next generation of organizations and data professionals? There is a lot of activity and conversation happening in and around data which can make it difficult to understand which parts are signal and which are noise. What, if anything, do you see as being truly new and/or innovative? Are there any core lessons or principles that you consider to be at risk of getting drowned out in the current frenzy of activity? How do the practices for building products with small teams differ from those employed by larger groups? What do you see as the threshold beyond which a team can no longer be considered "small"? What are the roles/skills/titles t

Jan 15, 202250 min

Ep 254Open Source Reverse ETL For Everyone With Grouparoo

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Summary Reverse ETL is a product category that evolved from the landscape of customer data platforms with a number of companies offering their own implementation of it. While struggling with the work of automating data integration workflows with marketing, sales, and support tools Brian Leonard accidentally discovered this need himself and turned it into the open source framework Grouparoo. In this episode he explains why he decided to turn these efforts into an open core business, how the platform is implemented, and the benefits of having an open source contender in the landscape of operational analytics products. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Brian Leonard about Grouparoo, an open source framework for managing your reverse ETL pipelines Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Grouparoo is and the story behind it? What are the core requirements for building a reverse ETL system? What are the additional capabilities that users of the system ask for as they get more advanced in their usage? Who is your target user for Grouparoo and how does that influence your priorities on feature development and UX design? What are the benefits of building an open source core for a reverse ETL platform as compared to the other commercial options? Can you describe the architecture and implementation of the Grouparoo project? What are the additional systems that you have built to support the hosted offering? How have the design and goals of the project changed since you first started working on it? What is the workflow for getting Grouparoo deployed and set up with an initial pipeline? How does Grouparoo handle model and schema evolution and potential mismatch in the data warehouse and destination systems? What is the process for building a new integration and getting it included in the official list of plugins? What is your strategy/philosophy around which features are included in the open source vs. hosted/enterprise offerings? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Grouparoo used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Grouparoo? When is Grouparoo the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Grouparoo? Contact Info LinkedIn @bleonard on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank y

Jan 8, 202244 min

Ep 253Data Observability Out Of The Box With Metaplane

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Summary Data observability is a set of technical and organizational capabilities related to understanding how your data is being processed and used so that you can proactively identify and fix errors in your workflows. In this episode Metaplane founder Kevin Hu shares his working definition of the term and explains the work that he and his team are doing to cut down on the time to adoption for this new set of practices. He discusses the factors that influenced his decision to start with the data warehouse, the potential shortcomings of that approach, and where he plans to go from there. This is a great exploration of what it means to treat your data platform as a living system and apply state of the art engineering to it. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Today’s episode is Sponsored by Prophecy.io – the low-code data engineering platform for the cloud. Prophecy provides an easy-to-use visual interface to design & deploy data pipelines on Apache Spark & Apache Airflow. Now all the data users can use software engineering best practices – git, tests and continuous deployment with a simple to use visual designer. How does it work? – You visually design the pipelines, and Prophecy generates clean Spark code with tests on git; then you visually schedule these pipelines on Airflow. You can observe your pipelines with built in metadata search and column level lineage. Finally, if you have existing workflows in AbInitio, Informatica or other ETL formats that you want to move to the cloud, you can import them automatically into Prophecy making them run productively on Spark. Create your free account today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prophecy. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kevin Hu about Metaplane, a platform aiming to provide observability for modern data stacks, from warehouses to BI dashboards and everything in between. Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Metaplane is and the story behind it? Data observability is an area that has seen a huge amount of activity over the past couple of years. What is your working definition of that term? What are the areas of differentiation that you see across vendors in the space? Can you describe how the Metaplane platform is architected? How have the design and goals of Metaplane changed or evolved since you started working on it? establishing seasonality in data metrics blind spots from operating at the level of the data warehouse What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Metaplane used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Metaplane? When is Metaplane the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Metaplane? Contact Info LinkedIn @kevinzhenghu on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Links Metaplane Datadog Control Theory James Clerk Maxwe

Jan 8, 202250 min

Ep 252Creating Shared Context For Your Data Warehouse With A Controlled Vocabulary

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Summary Communication and shared context are the hardest part of any data system. In recent years the focus has been on data catalogs as the means for documenting data assets, but those introduce a secondary system of record in order to find the necessary information. In this episode Emily Riederer shares her work to create a controlled vocabulary for managing the semantic elements of the data managed by her team and encoding it in the schema definitions in her data warehouse. She also explains how she created the dbtplyr package to simplify the work of creating and enforcing your own controlled vocabularies. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Emily Riederer about defining and enforcing column contracts and controlled vocabularies for your data warehouse Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by discussing some of the anti-patterns that you have encountered in data warehouse naming conventions and how it relates to the modeling approach? (e.g. star/snowflake schema, data vault, etc.) What are some of the types of contracts that can, and should, be defined and enforced in data workflows? What are the boundaries where we should think about establishing those contracts? What is the utility of column and table names for defining and enforcing contracts in analytical work? What is the process for establishing contractual elements in a naming schema? Who should be involved in that design process? Who are the participants in the communication paths for column naming contracts? What are some examples of context and details that can’t be captured in column names? What are some options for managing that additional information and linking it to the naming contracts? Can you describe the work that you have done with dbtplyr to make name contracts a supported construct in dbt projects? How does dbtplyr help in the creation and enforcement of contracts in the development of dbt workflows How are you using dbtplyr in your own work? How do you handle the work of building transformations to make data comply with contracts? What are the supplemental systems/techniques/documentation to work with name contracts and how they are leveraged by downstream consumers? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen naming contracts and/or dbtplyr used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on dbtplyr? When is dbtplyr the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of dbtplyr? Contact Info Twitter Website Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closi

Jan 2, 20221h 0m

Ep 251A Reflection On The Data Ecosystem For The Year 2021

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Summary This has been an active year for the data ecosystem, with a number of new product categories and substantial growth in existing areas. In an attempt to capture the zeitgeist Maura Church, David Wallace, Benn Stancil, and Gleb Mezhanskiy join the show to reflect on the past year and share their thought son the year to come. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Maura Church, David Wallace, Benn Stancil, and Gleb Mezhanskiy about the key themes of 2021 in the data ecosystem and what to expect for next year Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What were the main themes that you saw data practitioners and vendors focused on this year? What is the major bottleneck for Data teams in 2021? Will it be the same in 2022? One of the ways to reason about progress in any domain is to look at what was the primary bottleneck of further progress (data adoption for decision making) at different points in time. In the data domain, we have seen a number of bottlenecks, for example, scaling data platforms, the answer to which was Hadoop and on-prem columnar stores and then cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake & BigQuery. Then the problem was data integration and transformation which was solved by data integration vendors and frameworks such as Fivetran / Airbyte, modern orchestration frameworks such as Dagster & dbt and “reverse-ETL” Hightouch. What is the main challenge now? Will SQL be challenged as a primary interface to analytical data? In 2020 we’ve seen a few launches of post-SQL languages such as Malloy, Preql, metric layer query languages from Transform and Supergrain. To what extent does speed matter? Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen the resurgence of “benchmark wars” between major data warehousing platforms. To what extent do speed benchmarks inform decisions for modern data teams? How important is query speed in a modern data workflow? What needs to be true about your current DWH solution and potential alternatives to make a move? How has the way data teams work been changing? In 2020 remote seemed like a temporary emergency state. In 2021, it went mainstream. How has that affected the day-to-day of data teams, how they collaborate internally and with stakeholders? What’s it like to be a data vendor in 2021? Vertically integrated vs. modular data stack? There are multiple forces in play. Will the stack continue to be fragmented? Will we see major consolidation? If so, in which parts of the stack? Contact Info Maura LinkedIn Website @outoftheverse on Twitter David LinkedIn @davidjwallace on Twitter dwallace0723 on GitHub Benn LinkedIn @bennstancil on Twitter Gleb LinkedIn @

Jan 2, 20221h 3m

Ep 250Revisiting The Technical And Social Benefits Of The Data Mesh

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Summary The data mesh is a thesis that was presented to address the technical and organizational challenges that businesses face in managing their analytical workflows at scale. Zhamak Dehghani introduced the concepts behind this architectural patterns in 2019, and since then it has been gaining popularity with many companies adopting some version of it in their systems. In this episode Zhamak re-joins the show to discuss the real world benefits that have been seen, the lessons that she has learned while working with her clients and the community, and her vision for the future of the data mesh. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m welcoming back Zhamak Dehghani to talk about her work on the data mesh book and the lessons learned over the past 2 years Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving a brief recap of the principles of the data mesh and the story behind it? How has your view of the principles of the data mesh changed since our conversation in July of 2019? What are some of the ways that your work on the data mesh book influenced your thinking on the practical elements of implementing a data mesh? What do you view as the as-yet-unknown elements of the technical and social design constructs that are needed for a sustainable data mesh implementation? In the opening of your book you state that "Data Mesh is a new approach in sourcing, managing, and accessing data for analytical use cases at scale". As with everything, scale is subjective, but what are some of the heuristics that you rely on for determining when a data mesh is an appropriate solution? What are some of the ways that data mesh concepts manifest at the boundaries of organizations? While the idea of federated access to data product quanta reduces the amount of coordination necessary at the organizational level, it raises the spectre of more complex logic required for consumers of multiple quanta. How can data mesh implementations mitigate the impact of this problem? What are some of the technical components that you have found to be best suited to the implementation of data elements within a mesh? What are the technological components that are still missing for a mesh-native data platform? How should an organization that wishes to implement a mesh style architecture think about the roles and skills that they will need on staff? How can vendors factor into the solution? What is the role of application developers in a data mesh ecosystem and how do they need to change their thinking around the interfaces that they provide in their products? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen data mesh principles used? W

Dec 27, 20211h 10m

Ep 249Exploring The Evolving Role Of Data Engineers

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Summary Data Engineering is still a relatively new field that is going through a continued evolution as new technologies are introduced and new requirements are understood. In this episode Maxime Beauchemin returns to revisit what it means to be a data engineer and how the role has changed over the past 5 years. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Maxime Beauchemin about the impacts that the evolution of the modern data stack has had on the role and responsibilities of data engineers Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is your current working definition of a data engineer? How has that definition changed since your article on the "rise of the data engineer" and episode 3 of this show about "defining data engineering"? How has the growing availability of data infrastructure services shifted foundational skills and knowledge that are necessary to be effective? How should a new/aspiring data engineer focus their time and energy to become effective? One of the core themes in this current spate of technologies is "democratization of data". In your post on the downfall of the data engineer you called out the pressure on data engineers to maintain control with so many contributors with varying levels of skill and understanding. How well is the "modern data stack" balancing these concerns? An interesting impact of the growing usage of data is the constrained availability of data engineers. How do you see the effects of the job market on driving evolution of tooling and services? With the explosion of tools and services for working with data, a new problem has evolved of which ones to use for a given organization. What do you see as an effective and efficient process for enumerating and evaluating the available components for building a stack? There is also a lot of conversation around the "modern data stack", as well as the need for companies to build a "data platform". What (if any) difference do you see in the implications of those phrases and the skills required to compile a stack vs build a platform? How do you view the long term viability of templated SQL as a core workflow for transformations? What is the impact of more acessible and widespread machine learning/deep learning on data engineers/data infrastructure? How evenly distributed across industries and geographies are the advances in data infrastructure and engineering practices? What are some of the opportunities that are being missed or squandered during this dramatic shift in the data engineering landscape? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that yo

Dec 27, 202157 min

Ep 248Fast And Flexible Headless Data Analytics With Cube.JS

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Summary One of the perennial challenges of data analytics is having a consistent set of definitions, along with a flexible and performant API endpoint for querying them. In this episode Artom Keydunov and Pavel Tiunov share their work on Cube.js and the various ways that it is being used in the open source community. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Artyom Keydunov and Pavel Tiunov about Cube.js a framework for building analytics APIs to power your applications and BI dashboards Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Cube is and the story behind it? What are the main use cases and platform architectures that you are focused on? Who are the target personas that will be using and managing Cube.js? The name comes from the concept of an OLAP cube. Can you discuss the applications of OLAP cubes and their role in the current state of the data ecosystem? How does the idea of an OLAP cube compare to the recent focus on a dedicated metrics layer? What are the pieces of a data platform that might be replaced by Cube.js? Can you describe the design and architecture of the Cube platform? How has the focus and target use case for the Cube platform evolved since you first started working on it? One of the perpetually hard problems in computer science is cache management. How have you approached that challenge in the pre-aggregation layer of the Cube framework? What is your overarching design philosophy for the API of the Cube system? Can you talk through the workflow of someone building a cube and querying it from a downstream system? What do the iteration cycles look like as you go from initial proof of concept to a more sophisticated usage of Cube.js? What are some of the data modeling steps that are needed in the source systems? The perennial problem of embedding SQL into another host language or DSL is how to deal with validation and developer tooling. What are the utilities that you and the community have built to reduce friction while writing the definitions of a cube? What are the methods available for maintaining visibility across all of the cubes defined within and across installations of Cube.js? What are the opportunities for composing multiple cubes together to form a higher level aggregation? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Cube.js used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Cube? When is Cube the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Cube? Contact Info Artom keydunov on GitHub @keydunov on Twitter LinkedIn Pavel LinkedIn @paveltiunov87 on Twitter paveltiunov on GitHub Pa

Dec 21, 202154 min

Ep 247Building A System Of Record For Your Organization's Data Ecosystem At Metaphor

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Summary Building a well managed data ecosystem for your organization requires a holistic view of all of the producers, consumers, and processors of information. The team at Metaphor are building a fully connected metadata layer to provide both technical and social intelligence about your data. In this episode Pardhu Gunnam and Mars Lan explain how they have designed the architecture and user experience to allow everyone to collaborate on the data lifecycle and provide opportunities for automation and extensible workflows. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Pardhu Gunnam and Mars Lan about Metaphor Data, a platform aiming to be the system of record for your data ecosystem Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Metaphor is and the story behind it? On your site it states that you are aiming to be the "system of record" for your data platform. Can you unpack that statement and its implications? What are the shortcomings in the "data catalog" approach to metadata collection and presentation? Who are the target end users of Metaphor and what are the pain points for each persona that you are prioritizing? How has that focus informed your priorities for user experience design and feature development? Can you describe how the Metaphor platform is architected? What are the lessons that you learned from your work at DataHub that have informed your work on Metaphor? There has been a huge amount of focus on the "modern data stack" with an assumption that there is a cloud data warehouse as the central component that all data flows through. How does Metaphor’s design allow for usage in platforms that aren’t dominated by a cloud data warehouse? What are some examples of information that you can extract through integrations with an organization’s communication platforms? Can you talk through a few example workflows where that information is used to inform the actions taken by a team member? What is your philosophy around data modeling or schema standardization for metadata records? What are some of the challenges that teams face in stitching together a meaningful set of relations across metadata records in Metaphor? What are some of the features or potential use cases for Metaphor that are overlooked or misunderstood as you work with your customers? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Metaphor used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Metaphor? When is Metaphor the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Metaphor? Co

Dec 20, 20211h 5m

Ep 246Building Auditable Spark Pipelines At Capital One

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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 the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Gokul Prabagaren about how he is using Spark for real-world workflows at Capital One Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of the types of data and workflows that you are responsible for at Capital one? In terms of the three "V"s (Volume, Variety, Velocity), what is the magnitude of the data that you are working with? What are some of the business and regulatory requirements that have to be factored into the solutions that you design? Who are the consumers of the data assets that you are producing? Can you describe the technical elements of the platform that you use for managing your data pipelines? What are the various ways that you are using Spark at Capital One? You wrote a post and presented at the Databricks conference about your experience moving from a data filtering to a data enrichment pattern for segmenting transactions. Can you give some context as to the use case and what your design process was for the initial implementation? What were the shortcomings to that approach/business requirements which led you to refactoring the approach to one that maintained all of the data through the different processing stages? What are some of the impacts on data volumes and processing latencies working with enriched data frames persisted between task steps? What are some of the other optimizations or improvements that you have made to that pipeline since you wrote the post? What are some of the limitations of Spark that you have experienced during your work at Capital One? How have you worked around them? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Spark used at Capital One? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on data engineering at Capital One? What are some of the upcoming projects that you are focused on/excited for? How has your experience with the filtering vs. enrichment approach influenced your thinking on other projects that you work on? Contact Info @gocool_p on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management toda

Dec 13, 202142 min

Ep 245Deliver Personal Experiences In Your Applications With The Unomi Open Source Customer Data Platform

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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 useful profiles of your users, the system architecture that powers it, and some of the ways that it is being integrated into an organization’s broader data ecosystem. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Serge Huber about Apache Unomi, an open source customer data platform designed to manage customers, leads and visitors data and help personalize customers experiences Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Unomi is and the story behind it? What are the goals and target use cases of Unomi? What are the aspects of collecting and aggregating profile information that present challenges to developers? How does the design of Unomi reduce that burden? How does the focus of Unomi compare to systems such as Segment/Rudderstack or Optimizely for collecting user interactions and applying personalization? How does Unomi fit in the architecture of an application or data infrastructure? Can you describe how Unomi itself is architected? How have the goals and design of the project changed or evolved since it started? What are some of the most complex or challenging engineering projects that you have worked through? Can you describe the workflow of using Unomi to manage a set of customer profiles? What are some examples of user experience customization that you can build with Unomi? What are some alternative architectures that you have seen to produce similar capabilities? One of the interesting features of Unomi is the end-user profile management. What are some of the system and developer challenges that are introduced by that capability? (e.g. constraints on data manipulation, security, privacy concerns, etc.) How did Unomi manage privacy concerns and the GDPR ? How does Unomi help with the new third party data restrictions ? Why is access to raw data so important ? Could cloud providers offer Unomi as a service ? How have you used Unomi in your own work? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Unomi used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Unomi? When is Unomi the wrong choice? What do you

Dec 12, 202157 min

Ep 244Data Driven Hiring For Data Professionals With Alooba

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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 into your organizations overall data literacy. The whole process of hiring is an important organizational skill to cultivate and this is an interesting exploration of the specific challenges involved in finding data professionals. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tim Freestone about Alooba, an assessment platform for evaluating data and analytics candidates to improve hiring outcomes for data roles. Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Alooba is and the story behind it? What are the main goals that you are trying to achieve with Alooba? What are the main challenges that employers and candidates face when navigating their respective roles in the hiring process? What are some of the difficulties that are specific to data oriented roles? What are some of the complexities involved in designing a user experience that is positive and productive for both candidates and companies? What are some strategies that you have developed for establishing a fair and consistent baseline of skills to ensure consistent comparison across candidates? One of the problems that comes from test-based skills assessment is the implicit bias toward candidates who test well. How do you work to mitigate that in the candidate evaluation process? Can you describe how the Alooba platform itself is implemented? How have the goals and design of the system changed or evolved since you first started it? What are some of the ways that you use Alooba internally? How do you stay up to date with the evolving skill requirements as roles change and new roles are created? Beyond evaluation of candidates for hiring, what are some of the other features that you have added to Alooba to support organizations in their effort to gain value from their data? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Alooba used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Alooba? When is Alooba the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Alooba? Contact Info LinkedIn @timmyfreestone on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, wh

Dec 4, 202150 min

Ep 243Experimentation and A/B Testing For Modern Data Teams With Eppo

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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 focus on improving your business. In this episode he digs into the technical, statistical, and design requirements for running effective experiments and how he has architected the Eppo platform to make the process more accessible to business and data professionals. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Chetan Sharma about Eppo, a platform for building A/B experiments that are easier to manage Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Eppo is and the story behind it? What are some examples of the kinds of experiments that teams and organizations might want to conduct? What are the points of friction that What are the steps involved in designing, deploying, and analyzing the outcomes of an A/B experiment? What are some of the statistical errors that are common when conducting an experiment? What are the design and UX principles that you have focused on in Eppo to improve the workflow of building and analyzing experiments? Can you describe the system design of the Eppo platform? What are the services or capabilities external to Eppo that are required for it to be effective? What are the integration points for adding Eppo to an organization’s existing platform? Beyond the technical capabilities for running experiments there are a number of design requirements involved. Can you talk through some of the decisions that need to be made when deciding what to change and how to measure its impact? Another difficult element of managing experiments is understanding how they all interact with each other when running a large number of simultaneous tests. How does Eppo help with tracking the various experiments and the cohorts that are bucketed into each? What are some of the ideas or assumptions that you had about the technical and design aspects of running experiments that have been challenged or changed while building Eppo? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Eppo used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Eppo? When is Eppo the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Eppo? Contact Info LinkedIn @ches

Dec 4, 202158 min

Ep 242Creating A Unified Experience For The Modern Data Stack At Mozart Data

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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 getting started with the modern data stack. In this episode they explain how they designed a user experience to make working with data more accessibly by organizations without a data team, while allowing for more advanced users to build out more complex workflows. They also share their thoughts on the modern data ecosystem and how it improves the availability of analytics for companies of all sizes. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Peter Fishman and Dan Silberman about Mozart Data and how they are building a unified experience for the modern data stack Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Mozart Data is and the story behind it? The promise of the "modern data stack" is that it’s all delivered as a service to make it easier to set up. What are the missing pieces that make something like Mozart necessary? What are the main workflows or industries that you are focusing on? Who are the main personas that you are building Mozart for? How has that combination of user persona and industry focus informed your decisions around feature priorities and user experience? Can you describe how you have architected the Mozart platform? How have you approached the build vs. buy decision internally? What are some of the most interesting or challenging engineering projects that you have had to work on while building Mozart? What are the stages of the data lifecycle that you work the hardest to automate, and which do you focus on exposing to customers? What are the edge cases in what customers might try to do in the bounds of Mozart, or areas where you have explicitly decided not to include in your features? What are the options for extensibility, or custom engineering when customers encounter those situations? What do you see as the next phase in the evolution of the data stack? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Mozart used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Mozart? When is Mozart the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Mozart? Contact Info Peter LinkedIn @peterfishman on Twitt

Nov 27, 202158 min

Ep 241Doing DataOps For External Data Sources As A Service at Demyst

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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 to organize and catalog the various collections that they host, the various serving layers to provide query interfaces that match your platform, and the utility of having a single place to access a multitude of information. If you are having trouble answering questions for your business with the data that you generate and collect internally, then it is definitely worthwhile to explore the information available from external sources. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Mark Hookey about Demyst Data, a platform for operationalizing external data Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Demyst is and the story behind it? What are the services and systems that you provide for organizations to incorporate external sources in their data workflows? Who are your target customers? What are some examples of data sets that an organization might want to use in their analytics? How are these different from SaaS data that an organization might integrate with tools such as Stitcher and Fivetran? What are some of the challenges that are introduced by working with these external data sets? If an organization isn’t using Demyst what are some of the technical and organizational systems that they will need to build and manage? Can you describe how the Demyst platform is architected? What have been the most complex or difficult engineering challenges that you have dealt with while building Demyst? Given the wide variance in the systems that your customers are running, what are some strategies that you have used to provide flexible APIs for accessing the underlying information? What is the process for you to identify and onboard a new data source in your platform? What are some of the additional analytical systems that you have to run to manage your business (e.g. usage metering and analytics, etc.)? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Demyst used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Demyst? When is Demyst the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Demyst? Contact Info Linked

Nov 27, 202159 min

Ep 240Exploring Processing Patterns For Streaming Data Integration In Your Data Lake

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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 when coming from a batch oriented mindset. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ori Rafael about strategies for building stream and batch processing patterns for data lake analytics Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of the state of the market for data lakes today? What are the prevailing architectural and technological patterns that are being used to manage these systems? Batch and streaming systems have been used in various combinations since the early days of Hadoop. The Lambda architecture has largely been abandoned, so what is the answer for today’s data lakes? What are the challenges presented by streaming approaches to data transformations? The batch model for processing is intuitive despite its latency problems. What are the benefits that it provides? The core concept for data orchestration is the DAG. How does that manifest in a streaming context? In batch processing idempotent/immutable datasets are created by re-running the entire pipeline when logic changes need to be made. Given that there is no definitive start or end of a stream, what are the options for amending logical errors in transformations? What are some of the data processing/integration patterns that are impossible in a batch system? What are some useful strategies for migrating from a purely batch, or hybrid batch and streaming architecture, to a purely streaming system? What are some of the changes in technological or organizational patterns that are often overlooked or misunderstood in this shift? What are some of the most surprising things that you have learned about streaming systems in your time at Upsolver? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen streaming architectures used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on streaming data integration? When are streaming architectures the wrong approach? What do you have planned for the future of Upsolver to make streaming data easier to work with? Contact Info LinkedIn Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for da

Nov 20, 202152 min

Ep 239Laying The Foundation Of Your Data Platform For The Era Of Big Complexity With Dagster

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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 foundational layer for a holistic data platform. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform and blazing fast NVMe storage there’s nothing slowing you down. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Nick Schrock about the evolution of Dagster and its path forward Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Dagster is and the story behind it? How has the project and community changed/evolved since we last spoke 2 years ago? How has the experience of the past 2 years clarified the challenges and opportunities that exist in the data ecosystem? What do you see as the foundational vs transient complexities that are germane to the industry? One of the emerging ideas in Dagster is the "software defined data asset" as the central entity in the framework. How has that shifted the way that engineers approach pipeline design and composition? How did that conceptual shift inform the accompanying refactor of the core principles in the framework? (jobs, ops, graphs) One of the powerful elements of the Dagster framework is the investment in rich metadata as a foundational principle. What are the opportunities for integrating and extending that context throughout the rest of an organizations data platform? What do you see as the potential for efforts such as OpenLineage and OpenMetadata to allow for other components in the data platform to create and propagate that context more freely? What are some of the project architecture/repository structure/pipeline composition patterns that have begun to form in the community and your own internal work with Dagster? What are some of the anti-patterns that you have seen users fall into when working with Dagster? Along with your recent refactoring of the core API you have also started to roll out the Dagster Cloud offering. What was your process for determining the path to commercialization for the Dagster project and community? How are you managing governance and long-term viability of the open source elements of Dagster? What are your design principles for deciding the boundaries between OSS and commercial features? What do you see as the role of Dagster in the creation of a data platform architecture? What are the opportunities that it creates for data platform engineers? What is your perspective on the tradeoffs of pipelines as so

Nov 20, 20211h 5m

Ep 238Data Quality Starts At The Source

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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 Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Michael Harper about definitions of data quality and where to define and enforce it in the data platform Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is your definition for the term "data quality" and what are the implied goals that it embodies? What are some ways that different stakeholders and participants in the data lifecycle might disagree about the definitions and manifestations of data quality? The market for "data quality tools" has been growing and gaining attention recently. How would you categorize the different approaches taken by open source and commercial options in the ecosystem? What are the tradeoffs that you see in each approach? (e.g. data warehouse as a chokepoint vs quality checks on extract) What are the difficulties that engineers and stakeholders encounter when identifying and defining information that is necessary to identify issues in their workflows? Can you describe some examples of adding data quality checks to the beginning stages of a data workflow and the kinds of issues that can be identified? What are some ways that quality and observability metrics can be aggregated across multiple pipeline stages to identify more complex issues? In application observability the metrics across multiple processes are often associated with a given service. What is the equivalent concept in data platform observabiliity? In your work at Databand what are some of the ways that your ideas and assumptions around data quality have been challenged or changed? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Databand used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working at Databand? When is Databand the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Databand? Contact Info LinkedIn Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Databand Clean Architecture (affiliate link) Great Expectations Deequ The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Nov 14, 202158 min

Ep 237Eliminate Friction In Your Data Platform Through Unified Metadata Using OpenMetadata

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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 their time at Uber. They also explain how the OpenMetadat project is aiming to be a common standard for defining and storing metadata for every use case in data platforms and the ways that they are architecting the reference implementation to simplify its adoption. This is an ambitious and exciting project, so listen and try it out today. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sriharsha Chintalapani and Suresh Srinivas about OpenMetadata, an open standard for metadata and a reference implementation for a central metadata store Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what the OpenMetadata project is and the story behind it? What are the goals of the project? What are the common challenges faced by engineers and data practitioners in organizing the metadata for their systems? What are the capabilities that a centralized and holistic view of a platform’s metadata can enable? How would you characterize the current state and progress on the open source initiative around OpenMetadata? How does OpenMetadata compare to the OpenLineage project and other similar systems? What opportunities do you see for collaborating with or learning from their efforts? What are the schema elements that you have identified as critical to a holistic view of an organization’s metadata? For an organization with an existing data platform, what is the role that OpenMetadata plays, and what are the points of integration across the different components? Can you describe the implementation of the OpenMetadata architecture? What are the user experience and operational characteristics that you are trying to optimize for as you iterate on the project? What are the challenges that you face in balancing the generality and specificity of the core schemas for metadata objects? There are a large and growing number of bus

Nov 10, 20211h 6m

Ep 236Business Intelligence Beyond The Dashboard With ClicData

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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 organization without having to build and maintain that capability on their own. This is a great conversation about the technical and organizational operations involved in building a comprehensive business intelligence system and the current state of the market. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Telmo Silva about ClicData, Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what ClicData is and the story behind it? How would you characterize the current state of the market for business intelligence? What are the systems/capabilities that are required to run a full-featured BI system? What are the challenges that businesses face in developing in-house capacity for business intelligence? Can you describe how the ClicData platform is architected? How has it changed or evolved since you first began working on it? How are you approaching schema design and evolution in the storage layer? How do you handle questions of data security/privacy/regulations given that you are storing the information on behalf of the business? In your work with clients what are some of the challenges that businesses are facing when attempting to answer questions and gain insights from their data in a repeatable fashion? What are some strategies that you have found useful for structuring schemas or dashboards to make iterative exploration of data effective? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen ClicData used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on ClicData? When is ClicData the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of ClicData? Contact Info LinkedIn @telmo_clicdata on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a projec

Nov 6, 20211h 2m

Ep 235Exploring The Evolution And Adoption of Customer Data Platforms and Reverse ETL

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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. In this episode Tejas Manohar and Rachel Bradley-Haas share the story of their own careers and experiences coinciding with these trends. They also discuss the current state of the market for these technological patterns and how to take advantage of them in your own work. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo and start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Rachel Bradley-Haas and Tejas Manohar about the combination of operational analytics and the customer data platform Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can we start by discussing what it means to have a "customer data platform"? What are the challenges that organizations face in establishing a unified view of their customer interactions? How do the presence of multiple product lines impact the ability to understand the relationship with the customer? We have been building data warehouses and business intelligence systems for decades. How does the idea of a CDP differ from the approaches of those previous generations? A recent outgrowth of the focus on creating a CDP is the introduction of "operational analytics", which was initially termed "reverse ETL". What are your opinions on the semantics and importance of these names? What is the relationship between a CDP and operational analytics? (can you have one without the other?) How have the capabilities of operational analytics systems changed or evolved in the past couple of years? What new use cases or capabilities have been unlocked as a result of these changes? What are the opportunities over the medium to long term for operational analytics and customer data platforms? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen operational analytics and CDPs used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on operational analytics? When is a CDP the wrong choice? What other industry trends are you keeping an eye on? What do you anticipate will be the next breakout product category? Contact Info Rachel LinkedIn Tejas LinkedIn @tejasmanohar on Twitter tejasmanohar on GitHub Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to

Nov 5, 20211h 2m

Ep 234Removing The Barrier To Exploratory Analytics with Activity Schema and Narrator

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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 "activity schema" that is powering the Narrator platform, and how it has allowed his customers to perform self-service exploration of their business domains without being blocked by schema evolution in the data warehouse. This is a fascinating exploration of what can be done when you challenge your assumptions about what is possible. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ahmed Elsamadisi about Narrator, a platform to enable anyone to go from question to data-driven decision in minutes Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Narrator is and the story behind it? What are the challenges that you have seen organizations encounter when attempting to make analytics a self-serve capability? What are the use cases that you are focused on? How does Narrator fit within the data workflows of an organization? How is the Narrator platform implemented? How has the design and focus of the technology evolved since you first started working on Narrator? The core element of the analyses that you are building is the "activity schema". Can you describe the design process that led you to that format? What are the challenges that are posed by more widely used modeling techniques such as star/snowflake or data vault? How does the activity schema address those challenges? What are the performance characteristics of deriving models from an activity schema/timeseries table? For someone who wants to use Narrator, what is involved in transforming their data to map into the activity schema? Can you talk through the domain modeling that needs to happen when determining what entities and actions to capture? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Narrator used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Narrator? When is Narrator the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Narrator? Contact Info LinkedIn @ae4ai on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Narrator DARPA Challenge Fivetran Luigi Chartio Airflow Domain Driven Design Da

Oct 29, 20211h 8m

Ep 233Streaming Data Pipelines Made SQL With Decodable

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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 build streaming pipelines entirely in SQL. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Eric Sammer about Decodable, a platform for simplifying the work of building real-time data pipelines Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Decodable is and the story behind it? Who are the target users, and how has that focus informed your prioritization of features at launch? What are the complexities that data engineers encounter when building pipelines on streaming systems? What are the distributed systems concepts and design optimizations that are often skipped over or misunderstood by engineers who are using them? (e.g. backpressure, exactly once semantics, isolation levels, etc.) How do those mismatches in understanding and expectation impact the correctness and reliability of the workflows that they are building? Can you describe how you have architected the Decodable platform? What have been the most complex or time consuming engineering challenges that you have dealt with so far? What are the points of integration that you expose for engineers to wire in their existing infrastructure and data systems? What has been your process for designing the interfaces and abstractions that you are exposing to end users? What are some of the leaks in those abstractions that have either started to show or are anticipated? What have you learned about the state of data engineering and the costs and benefits of real-time data while working on Decodable? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Decodable used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Decodable? When is Decodable the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Decodable? Contact Info esammer on GitHub @esammer on Twitter LinkedIn Part

Oct 29, 20211h 9m

Ep 232Data Exploration For Business Users Powered By Analytics Engineering With Lightdash

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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 already doing in your data warehouse modeling with dbt, and how they are focusing on bridging the divide between data teams and business teams and the requirements that they have for data workflows. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Oliver Laslett about Lightdash, an open source business intelligence system powered by your dbt models Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Lightdash is and the story behind it? What are the main goals of the project? Who are the target users, and how has that profile informed your feature priorities? Business intelligence is a market that has gone through several generational shifts, with products targeting numerous personas and purposes. What are the capabilities that make Lightdash stand out from the other options? Can you describe how Lightdash is architected? How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved since you first began working on it? What have been the most challenging engineering problems that you have dealt with? How does the approach that you are taking with Lightdash compare to systems such as Transform and Metriql that aim to provide a dedicated metrics layer? Can you describe the workflow for someone building an analysis in Lightdash? What are the points of collaboration around Lightdash for different roles in the organization? What are the methods that you use to expose information about the state of the underlying dbt models to the end users? How do they use that information in their exploration and decision making? What was your motivation for releasing Lightdash as open source? How are you handling the governance and long-term viability of the project? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Lightdash used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Lightdash? When is Lightdash the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Lightdash? Contact Info LinkedIn owlas on GitHub Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Lightdash Looker Podcast Episode Powe

Oct 23, 20211h 6m

Ep 231Completing The Feedback Loop Of Data Through Operational Analytics With Census

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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 consolidated data about your customers back into the systems that you use to interact with those customers allows for a powerful feedback loop that has been missing in data systems until now. He also discusses how Census makes that synchronization easy to manage, how it fits with the growth of data quality tooling, and how you can start using it today. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Boris Jabes about Census and the growing category of operational analytics Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Census is and the story behind it? The terms "reverse ETL" and "operational analytics" have started being used for similar, and often interchangeable, purposes. What are your thoughts on the semantic and concrete differences between these phrases? What are the motivating factors for adding operational analytics or "data activation" to an organization’s data platform? This is a nascent but quickly growing market with a number of products and projects operating in the space. How would you characterize the current state of the segment and Census’ position in it? Can you describe how the Census platform is implemented? What are some of the early design choices that have had to be refactored or augmented as you have evolved the product and worked with customers? What are some of the assumptions that you had about the needs and uses for the platform which have been challenged or changed as you dug deeper into the problem? Can you describe the workflow for a customer adopting Census? What are some of the data modeling practices that make it easier to "activate" the organization’s data? Another recent trend in the data industry is the growth of data quality and data lineage tools. What is involved in using the measured quality or lineage informat

Oct 21, 20211h 9m

Ep 230Bringing The Power Of The DataHub Real-Time Metadata Graph To Everyone At Acryl Data

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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 Swaroop Jagadish founded Acryl Data. In this episode they discuss the recent work that has been done by the community, how their work is building on top of that foundation, and how you can get started with DataHub for your own work to manage data discovery today. They also share their ambitions for the near future of adding data observability and data quality management features. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Once you sign up and create an alert in Datafold for your company data, they will send you a cool water flask. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Shirshanka Das and Swaroop Jagadish about Acryl Data, the company driving the open source metadata project DataHub for powering data discovery, data observability and federated data governance. Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Acryl Data is and the story behind it? How has your experience of building and running DataHub at LinkedIn informed your product direction for Acryl? What are some lessons that your co-founder Swaroop has contributed from his experience at AirBnB? The data catalog/discovery/quality market has become very active over the past year. What is your perspective on the market, and what are the gaps that are not yet being addressed? How does the focus of Acryl compare to what the team at Metaphor are building? How has the DataHub project changed in the past year with more companies outside of LinkedIn using and contributing to it? What are your plans for Data Observability? Can you describe the system architecture that you have built at Acryl? What are the convenience features that you are building to augment the capabilities and integration process for DataHub? What are some typical workflows that data teams build out when working with Acryl? What are some examples of automated actions that can be triggered from metadata changes? What are the available events that can be used to trigger actions? What are some of the challenges that teams are facing when integrating metadata management and analysis into their data workflows? What are your thoughts on the potential for the Open Lineage and Open metadata projects? How is the governance of DataHub being managed? What are the

Oct 16, 20211h 8m

Ep 229How And Why To Become Data Driven As A Business

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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 distilling them for his book "Fail Fast, Learn Faster". This is an entertaining and enlightening exploration of the business side of data with an industry veteran. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Randy Bean about his recent book focusing on the use of big data and AI for informing data driven business leadership Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by discussing the focus of the book and what motivated you to write it? Who is the intended audience, and how did that inform the tone and content? Businesses and their officers have been aiming to be "data driven" for years. In your experience, what are the concrete goals that are implied by that term? What are the barriers that organizations encounter in the pursuit of those goals? How have the success rates (real and imagined) shifted in recent years as the level of sophistication of the tools and industry for data management has increased? What is the state of data initiatives in leading corporations today? What are the biggest opportunities and risks that organizations focus on related to their use of data? At what level(s) of the organization do lessons around data ethics need to be embedded? You have been working with large companies for many years to help them with their adoption of "big data". How has your work on this book shifted or clarified your perspectives on the subject? What are the main lessons or ideas that you hope readers will take away from the book? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen big data applied to business? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on this book? What are your predictions for the next decade of big data and AI? Contact Info @RandyBeanNVP on Twitter LinkedIn Email Parting

Oct 14, 20211h 2m

Ep 228Make Your Business Metrics Reusable With Open Source Headless BI Using Metriql

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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 the project, how you can use it to create your metrics definitions, and the benefits of treating the semantic layer as a dedicated component of your platform. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Once you sign up and create an alert in Datafold for your company data, they will send you a cool water flask. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Burak Emre Kabakcı about Metriql, a headless BI and metrics layer for your data stack Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Metriql is and the story behind it? What are the characteristics and benefits of a "headless BI" system? What was your motivation to create and open-source Metriql as an independent project outside of your business? How are you approaching governance and sustainability of the project? How does Metriql compare to projects such as AirBnB’s Minerva or Transform’s platform? How does the industry/vertical of a business impact their ability to benefit from a metrics layer/headless BI? What are the limitations to the logical complexity that can be applied to the calculation of a given metric/set of metrics? Can you describe how Metriql is implemented? How have the design and goals of the project changed or evolved since you began working on it? What are the most complex/difficult engineering elements of building a metrics layer? Can you describe the workflow of defining metrics? What have been your guiding principles in defining the user experience for working with metriql? What are the opportunities for including business users in the definition of metrics? (e.g. pushing down/generating definitions from a BI layer) What are the biggest challenges and limitations of creating metrics definitions purely in SQL? What are the options for exposing metrics back to the warehouse and other operational systems such as reverse ETL vendors? What are the missing elements in the data ecosystem for taking full advantage of a headless BI/metrics layer? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Metriql used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Metriql? When is Metriql the wrong choice? W

Oct 8, 202143 min

Ep 227Adding Support For Distributed Transactions To The Redpanda Streaming Engine

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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 support, and how his implementation ended up improving the performance of bulk write operations. This is an interesting deep dive into the internals of a high performance streaming engine and the details that are involved in building distributed systems. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Denis Rystsov about implementing transactions in the RedPanda streaming engine Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you quickly recap what RedPanda is and the goals of the project? What are the use cases for transactions in a pub/sub messaging system? What are the elements of streaming systems that make atomic transactions a complex problem? What was the motivation for starting down the path of adding transactions to the RedPanda engine? How did the constraint of supporting the Kafka API influence your implementation strategy for transaction semantics? Can you talk through the details of how you ended up implementing transactions in RedPanda? What are some of the roadblocks and complexities that you encountered while working through the implementation? How did you approach the validation and verification of the transactions? What other features or capabilities are you planning to work on next? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen transactions in RedPanda used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on transactions for RedPanda? When are transactions the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of transaction support in RedPanda? Contact Info @rystsov on twitter LinkedIn Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Vectorized RedPanda Podcast Episode RedPanda Transactions Post Yandex Cassandra MongoDB Riak Cosmos DB Jepsen

Oct 6, 202145 min

Ep 226Building Real-Time Data Platforms For Large Volumes Of Information With Aerospike

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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 need to deal with massive data, at high velocities, in milliseconds, then Aerospike is definitely worth learning about. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold’s proactive approach to data quality helps data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Lenley Hensarling about Aerospike and building real-time data platforms Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Aerospike is and the story behind it? What are the use cases that it is uniquely well suited for? What are the use cases that you and the Aerospike team are focusing on and how does that influence your focus on priorities of feature development and user experience? What are the driving factors for building a real-time data platform? How is Aerospike being incorporated in application and data architectures? Can you describe how the Aerospike engine is architected? How have the design and architecture changed or evolved since it was first created? How have market forces influenced the product priorities and focus? What are the challenges that end users face when determining how to model their data given a key/value storage interface? What are the abstraction layers that you and/or your users build to manage reliational or hierarchical data architectures? What are the operational characteristics of the Aerospike system? (e.g. deployment, scaling, CP vs AP, upgrades, clustering, etc.) What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Aerospike used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Aerospike? When is Aerospike the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Aerospike? Contact Info LinkedIn Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Aerospike GitHub EnterpriseDB "Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition" ARM CPU Architectures AWS Graviton Processors The Datacenter Is The Computer (Affiliate link) Jepsen Tests Podcast Episode Cloud Native Computing Foundation Prometheus Grafana OpenTelemetry Podcast.__init__ Episode The

Oct 2, 20211h 7m

Ep 225Delivering Your Personal Data Cloud With Prifina

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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 users to create their own personal data cloud and install applications built by developers that power useful experiences while keeping you in full control. In this episode Markus Lampinen shares the goals and vision of the company, the technical aspects of making it a reality, and the future vision for how services can be designed to respect user’s privacy while still providing compelling experiences. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Markus Lampinen about Prifina, a platform for building applications powered by personal data that is under the user’s control Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Prifina is and the story behind it? What are the primary goals of Prifina? There has been a lof of interest in the "quantified self" and different projects (many that are open source) which aim to aggregate all of a user’s data into a single system for analysis and integration. What was lacking in the ecosystem that makes Prifina necessary/valuable? What are some of the personalized applications for this data that have been most compelling or that users are most interested in? What are the sources of complexity that you are facing when managing access/privacy of user’s data? Can you describe the architecture of the platform that you are building? What are the technological/social/economic underpinnings that are necessary to make a platform like Prifina possible? What are the assumptions that you had when you first became involved in the project which have been challenged or invalidated as you worked through the implementation and began engaging with users and developers? How do you approach schema definition/management for developers to have a stable implementation target? How has that schema evolved as you introduced new data sources? What are the barriers t

Sep 30, 20211h 12m

Ep 224Digging Into Data Reliability Engineering

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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 adopting it in your own teams. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Schema changes, missing data, and volume anomalies caused by your data sources can happen without any advanced notice if you lack visibility into your data-in-motion. That leaves DataOps reactive to data quality issues and can make your consumers lose confidence in your data. By connecting to your pipeline orchestrator like Apache Airflow and centralizing your end-to-end metadata, Databand.ai lets you identify data quality issues and their root causes from a single dashboard. With Databand.ai, you’ll know whether the data moving from your sources to your warehouse will be available, accurate, and usable when it arrives. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/databand to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Databand.ai and take control of your data quality today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Egor Gryaznov, co-founder and CTO of Bigeye, about the ideas and practices of data reliability engineering and how to integrate it into your systems Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What does the term "Data Reliability Engineering" mean? What is encompassed under the umbrella of Data Reliability Engineering? How does it compare to the concepts from site reliability engineering? Is DRE just a repackaged version of DataOps? Why is Data Reliability Engineering particularly important now? Who is responsible for the practice of DRE in an organization? What are some areas of innovation that teams are focusing on to support a DRE practice? What are the tools that teams are using to improve the reliability of their data operations? What are the organizational systems that need to be in place to support a DRE practice? What are some potential roadblocks that teams might have to address when planning and implementing a DRE strategy? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected approaches/solutions to DRE that you have seen? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Data Reliability Engineering? Is Data Reliability Engineering ever the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Bigeye, especially in terms of Data Reliability Engineering? Contact Info Find us at bigeye.com or reach out to us at [email protected] You can find Egor on LinkedIn or email him at [email protected] Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Bigeye Podcast Episode Vertica Looker Podcast Episode Site Reliability Engineering Stemma Podcast Episode Collibra Podcast Episode OpenLineage Podcast Episode The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Sep 26, 202158 min

Ep 223Massively Parallel Data Processing In Python Without The Effort Using Bodo

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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 re-work. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ehsan Totoni about Bodo, a system for automatically optimizing and parallelizing python code for massively parallel data processing and analytics Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Bodo is and the story behind it? What are the techniques/technologies that teams might use to optimize or scale out their data processing workflows? Why have you focused your efforts on the Python language and toolchain? Do you see any potential for expanding into other language communities? What are the shortcomings of projects such as Dask and Ray for scaling out Python data projects? Many people are familiar with the principle of HPC architectures, but can you share an overview of the current state of the art for HPC? What are the tradeoffs of HPC vs scale-out distributed systems? Can you describe the technical implementation of the Bodo platform? What are the aspects of the Python language and package ecosystem that have complicated the work of building an optimizing compiler? How do you handle compiled extensions? (e.g. C/C++/Fortran) What are some of the assumptions/expectations that you had when first approaching this project that have been challenged as you progressed through its implementation? How do you handle data distribution for scale out computation? What are some software architecture/programming patterns that act as bottlenecks/optimization cliffs for parallelization? What are some of the educational challenges that you have run into while working with potential and current customers? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Bodo used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Bodo? When is Bodo the wrong choice? What do you have planned for th

Sep 25, 20211h 4m

Ep 222Declarative Machine Learning Without The Operational Overhead Using Continual

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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 on the benefits of declarative machine learning workflows as a means of accelerating adoption in businesses that don’t have the time, money, or ambition to build everything from scratch. He also discusses the technical underpinnings of what he is building and how using the data warehouse as a shared resource drastically shortens the time required to see value. This is a fascinating episode and Tristan’s work at Continual is likely to be the catalyst for a new stage in the machine learning community. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Schema changes, missing data, and volume anomalies caused by your data sources can happen without any advanced notice if you lack visibility into your data-in-motion. That leaves DataOps reactive to data quality issues and can make your consumers lose confidence in your data. By connecting to your pipeline orchestrator like Apache Airflow and centralizing your end-to-end metadata, Databand.ai lets you identify data quality issues and their root causes from a single dashboard. With Databand.ai, you’ll know whether the data moving from your sources to your warehouse will be available, accurate, and usable when it arrives. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/databand to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Databand.ai and take control of your data quality today. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tristan Zajonc about Continual, a platform for automating the creation and application of operational AI on top of your data warehouse Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Continual is and the story behind it? What is your definition for "operational AI" and how does it differ from other applications of ML/AI? What are some example use cases for AI in an operational capacity? What are the barriers to adoption for organizations that want to take advantage of predictive analytics? Who are the target users of Continual? Can you describe how the Continual platform is implemented? How has the design and infrastructure changed or evolved since you first began working on it? What is the workflow for someone building a model and putting it into production? Once a model has been deployed, what are the mechanisms that you expose for interacting with it? How does this differ from in-database ML capabilities such as what is offered by Vertica and BigQuery? How much understanding of ML/AI principles is necessary for someone to create a model with Continual? What is your estimation of the impact that Continual can have on the overall productivity of a data team/data scientist? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Continual used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Continual? When is Continual the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Continual? Contact Info LinkedIn @tristanzajonc on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing A

Sep 19, 20211h 11m

Ep 221An Exploration Of The Data Engineering Requirements For Bioinformatics

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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 data infrastructure that they need to get their work done. This is a fascinating exploration of the collaboration between data professionals and scientists. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Jillian Rowe about data engineering practices for bioinformatics projects Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? How did you get into the field of bioinformatics? Can you describe what is unique about data needs in bioinformatics? What are some of the problems that you have found yourself regularly solving for your clients? When building data engineering stacks for bioinformatics, what are the attributes that you are optimizing for? (e.g. speed, UX, scale, correctness, etc.) Can you describe a typical set of technologies that you implement when working on a new project? What kinds of systems do you need to integrate with? What are the data formats that are widely used for bioinformatics? What are some details that a data engineer would need to know to work effectively with those formats while preparing data for analysis? What amount of domain expertise is necessary for a data engineer to work in life sciences? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected solutions that you have seen for manipulating bioinformatics data? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on bioinformatics projects? What are some of the industry/academic trends or upcoming technologies that you are tracking for bioinformatics? Contact Info LinkedIn jerowe on GitHub Website Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Bioinformatics How Perl Saved The Human Genome Project Neo4J AWS Parallel Cluster Datashader R Shiny Plotly Dash Apache Parquet Dask Podcast Episode HDF5 Spark Superset Data Engineerin

Sep 19, 202155 min

Ep 220Setting The Stage For The Next Chapter Of The Cassandra Database

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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 improvements are setting the stage for the future of the project. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Schema changes, missing data, and volume anomalies caused by your data sources can happen without any advanced notice if you lack visibility into your data-in-motion. That leaves DataOps reactive to data quality issues and can make your consumers lose confidence in your data. By connecting to your pipeline orchestrator like Apache Airflow and centralizing your end-to-end metadata, Databand.ai lets you identify data quality issues and their root causes from a single dashboard. With Databand.ai, you’ll know whether the data moving from your sources to your warehouse will be available, accurate, and usable when it arrives. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/databand to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Databand.ai and take control of your data quality today. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ben Bromhead about the recent release of Cassandra version 4 and how it fits in the current landscape of data tools Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? For anyone who isn’t familiar with Cassandra, can you briefly describe what it is and some of the story behind it? How did you get involved in the Cassandra project and how would you characterize your role? What are the main use cases and industries where someone is likely to use Cassandra? What is notable about the version 4 release? What were some of the factors that contributed to the long delay between versions 3 and 4? (2015 – 2021) What are your thoughts on the ongoing utility/benefits of projects such as ScyllaDB, particularly in light of the most recent release? Cassandra is primarily used as a system of record. What are some of the tools and system architectures that users turn to when building analytical workloads for data stored in Cassandra? The architecture of Cassandra has lent itself well to the cloud native ecosystem that has been growing in recent years. What do you see as the opportunities for Cassandra over the near to medium term as the cloud continues to grow in prominence? What are some of the challenges that you and the Cassandra community have faced with the flurry of new data storage and processing systems that have popped up over the past few years? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Cassandra used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Cassandra? When is Cassandra the wrong choice? What is in store for the future of Cassandra? Contact Info LinkedIn @benbromhead on Twitter benbromhead on GitHub Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Cassandra Instaclustr HBase DynamoDB Whitepaper Property Based Testing QuickTheories Riak FoundationDB Podcast Episode ScyllaDB Podcast Episode YugabyteDB Podcast Episode Azure CosmoDB Amazon Keyspaces Netty Kafka CQRS == Command Query Responsibility Segregation Elasticsearch Redis Memcached Debez

Sep 12, 202159 min

Ep 219A View From The Round Table Of Gartner's Cool Vendors

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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 Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Have you ever had to develop ad-hoc solutions for security, privacy, and compliance requirements? Are you spending too much of your engineering resources on creating database views, configuring database permissions, and manually granting and revoking access to sensitive data? Satori has built the first DataSecOps Platform that streamlines data access and security. Satori’s DataSecOps automates data access controls, permissions, and masking for all major data platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift and SQL Server and even delegates data access management to business users, helping you move your organization from default data access to need-to-know access. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/satori today and get a $5K credit for your next Satori subscription. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Saket Saurabh, Maarten Masschelein, Akshay Deshpande, and Dan Weitzner about the challenges facing data practitioners today and the solutions that are being brought to market for addressing them, as well as the work they are doing that got them recognized as "cool vendors" by Gartner. Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you each describe what you view as the biggest challenge facing data professionals? Who are you building your solutions for and what are the most common data management problems are you all solving? What are different components of Data Management and why is it so complex? What will simplify this process, if any? The report covers a lot of new data management terminology – data governance, data observability, data fabric, data mesh, DataOps, MLOps, AIOps – what does this all mean and why is it important for data engineers? How has the data management space changed in recent times? Describe the current data management landscape and any key developments. From your perspective, what are the biggest challenges in the data management space today? What modern data management features are lacking in existing databases? Gartner imagines a future where data and analytics leaders need to be prepared to rely on data management solutions that make heterogeneous, distributed data appear consolidated, easy to access and business friendly. How does this tally with your vision of the future of data management and what needs to happen to make this a reality? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen your respective products used (in isolation or combined)? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on your respective platforms? What are the upcoming trends and challenges that you are keeping a close eye on? Contact Info Saket LinkedIn @saketsaurabh on Twitter Maarten LinkedIn @masscheleinm on Twitter Dan LinkedIn Akshay Website Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Nexla Soda Tada Timbr Collibra Podcast Episode Gartner Cool Vendors The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Fre

Sep 9, 20211h 4m

Ep 218Designing And Building Data Platforms As A Product

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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 use to power your data systems and considerations for how they can be woven together for a unified experience across your various stakeholders. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Lior Gavish, Lior Solomon, and Atul Gupte about the technical, social, and architectural aspects of building your data platform as a product for your internal customers Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? – all Can we start by establishing a definition of "data platform" for the purpose of this conversation? Who are the stakeholders in a data platform? Where does the responsibility lie for creating and maintaining ("owning") the platform? What are some of the technical and organizational constraints that are likely to factor into the design and execution of the platform? What are the minimum set of requirements necessary to qualify as a platform? (as opposed to a collection of discrete components) What are the additional capabilities that should be in place to simplify the use and maintenance of the platform? How are data platforms managed? Are they managed by technical teams, product managers, etc.? What is the profile for a data product manager? – Atul G. How do you set SLIs / SLOs with your data platform team when you don’t have clear metrics you’re tracking? – Lior S. There has been a lot of conversation recently about different interpretations of the "modern data stack". For a team who is just starting to build out their platform, how much credence should they be giving to those debates? What are the first steps that you recommend for those practitioners? If an organization already has infrastructure in place for data/analytics, how might they think about building or buying their way toward a well integrated platform? Once a platform is established, what are some challenges that teams should anticipate in scaling the platform? Which axes of scale have you found to be most difficult to manage? (scale of infrastructure capacity, scale of organizational/technical complexity, scale of usage, etc.) Do we think the "data platform" is a skill set? How do we split up the role of the platform? Is there one for real-time? Is there one for ETLs? How do you handle the quality and reliability of the data powering your solution? What are helpful techniques that you have used for collecting, prioritizing, and managing feature requests? How

Sep 4, 20211h 0m

Ep 217Presto Powered Cloud Data Lakes At Speed Made Easy With Ahana

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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 and increase query throughput, the ways that they are contributing back to the open source community, and the exciting improvements that are in the works to make Presto an even more powerful option for all of your analytics. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Schema changes, missing data, and volume anomalies caused by your data sources can happen without any advanced notice if you lack visibility into your data-in-motion. That leaves DataOps reactive to data quality issues and can make your consumers lose confidence in your data. By connecting to your pipeline orchestrator like Apache Airflow and centralizing your end-to-end metadata, Databand.ai lets you identify data quality issues and their root causes from a single dashboard. With Databand.ai, you’ll know whether the data moving from your sources to your warehouse will be available, accurate, and usable when it arrives. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/databand to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Databand.ai and take control of your data quality today. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Dipti Borkar, cofounder Ahana about Presto and Ahana, SaaS managed service for Presto Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Ahana is and the story behind it? There has been a lot of recent activity in the Presto community. Can you give an overview of the options that are available for someone wanting to use its SQL engine for querying their data? What is Ahana’s role in the community/ecosystem? (happy to skip this question if it’s too contentious) What are some of the notable differences that have emerged over the past couple of years between the Trino (formerly PrestoSQL) and PrestoDB projects? Another area that has been seeing a lot of activity is data lakes and projects to make them more manageable and feature complete (e.g. Hudi, Delta Lake, Iceberg, Nessie, LakeFS, etc.). How has that influenced your product focus and capabilities? How does this activity change the calculus for organizations who are deciding on a lake or warehouse for their data architecture? Can you describe how the Ahana Cloud platform is architected? What are the additional systems that you have built to manage deployment, scaling, and multi-tenancy? Beyond the storage and processing, what are the other notable tools and projects that have become part of the overall stack for supporting open analytics? What are some areas of ongoing activity that you are keeping an eye on as you build out the Ahana offerings? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Ahana/Presto used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Ahana? When is Ahana the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Ahana? Contact Info LinkedIn @dborkar on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Ahana Alluxio Podcast Episode Couchbase Kinetica Tensorflow PyTorch Podcast.__init__ Ep

Sep 2, 20211h 0m

Ep 216Do Away With Data Integration Through A Dataware Architecture With Cinchy

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Summary The reason that so much time and energy is spent on data integration is because of how our applications are designed. By making the software be the owner of the data that it generates, we have to go through the trouble of extracting the information to then be used elsewhere. The team at Cinchy are working to bring about a new paradigm of software architecture that puts the data as the central element. In this episode Dan DeMers, Cinchy’s CEO, explains how their concept of a "Dataware" platform eliminates the need for costly and error prone integration processes and the benefits that it can provide for transactional and analytical application design. This is a fascinating and unconventional approach to working with data, so definitely give this a listen to expand your thinking about how to build your systems. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Have you ever had to develop ad-hoc solutions for security, privacy, and compliance requirements? Are you spending too much of your engineering resources on creating database views, configuring database permissions, and manually granting and revoking access to sensitive data? Satori has built the first DataSecOps Platform that streamlines data access and security. Satori’s DataSecOps automates data access controls, permissions, and masking for all major data platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift and SQL Server and even delegates data access management to business users, helping you move your organization from default data access to need-to-know access. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/satori today and get a $5K credit for your next Satori subscription. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Dan DeMers about Cinchy, a dataware platform aiming to simplify the work of data integration by eliminating ETL/ELT Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Cinchy is and the story behind it? In your experience working in data and building complex enterprise-grade systems, what are the shortcomings and negative externalities of an ETL/ELT approach to data integration? How is a Dataware platform from a data lake or data warehouses? What is it used for? What is Zero-Copy Integration? How does that work? Can you describe how customers start their Cinchy journey? What are the main use case patterns that you’re seeing with Dataware? Your platform offers unlimited users, including business users. What are some of the challenges that you face in building a user experience that doesn’t become overwhelming as an organization scales the number of data sources and processing flows? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Cinchy used? When is Cinchy the wrong choice for a customer? Can you describe the technical architecture of the Cinchy platform? How do you establish connections/relationships among data from disparate sources? How do you manage schema evolution in source systems? What are some of the edge cases that users need to consider as they are designing and building those connections? What are some of the features or capabilities of Cinchy that you think are overlooked or under-utilized? How has your understanding of the problem space changed since you started working on Cinchy? How has the architecture and design of the system evolved to reflect that updated understanding? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Cinchy? What do you have planned for the future of Cinchy? Contact Info LinkedIn @dandemers

Aug 28, 202151 min

Ep 215Decoupling Data Operations From Data Infrastructure Using Nexla

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Summary The technological and social ecosystem of data engineering and data management has been reaching a stage of maturity recently. As part of this stage in our collective journey the focus has been shifting toward operation and automation of the infrastructure and workflows that power our analytical workloads. It is an encouraging sign for the industry, but it is still a complex and challenging undertaking. In order to make this world of DataOps more accessible and manageable the team at Nexla has built a platform that decouples the logical unit of data from the underlying mechanisms so that you can focus on the problems that really matter to your business. In this episode Saket Saurabh (CEO) and Avinash Shahdadpuri (CTO) share the story behind the Nexla platform, discuss the technical underpinnings, and describe how their concept of a Nexset simplifies the work of building data products for sharing within and between organizations. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Schema changes, missing data, and volume anomalies caused by your data sources can happen without any advanced notice if you lack visibility into your data-in-motion. That leaves DataOps reactive to data quality issues and can make your consumers lose confidence in your data. By connecting to your pipeline orchestrator like Apache Airflow and centralizing your end-to-end metadata, Databand.ai lets you identify data quality issues and their root causes from a single dashboard. With Databand.ai, you’ll know whether the data moving from your sources to your warehouse will be available, accurate, and usable when it arrives. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/databand to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Databand.ai and take control of your data quality today. We’ve all been asked to help with an ad-hoc request for data by the sales and marketing team. Then it becomes a critical report that they need updated every week or every day. Then what do you do? Send a CSV via email? Write some Python scripts to automate it? But what about incremental sync, API quotas, error handling, and all of the other details that eat up your time? Today, there is a better way. With Census, just write SQL or plug in your dbt models and start syncing your cloud warehouse to SaaS applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and many more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/census today to get a free 14-day trial. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Saket Saurabh and Avinash Shahdadpuri about Nexla, a platform for powering data operations and sharing within and across businesses Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Nexla is and the story behind it? What are the major problems that Nexla is aiming to solve? What are the components of a data platform that Nexla might replace? What are the use cases and benefits of being able to publish data sets for use outside and across organizations? What are the different elements involved in implementing DataOps? How is the Nexla platform implemented? What have been the most comple engineering challenges? How has the architecture changed or evolved since you first began working on it? What are some of the assumptions that you had at the start which have been challenged or invalidated? What are some of the heuristics that you have found most useful in generating logical units of data in an automated fashion? Once a Nexset has been created, what are some of the ways that they can be used or further processed? What are the attributes of a Nexset? (e.g. access control policies, lineage, etc.) How do you handle storage and sharing of a Nexset? What are some of your grand hopes and ambitions for the Nexla platform and the potential for data exchanges? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Nexla used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Nexla? When is Nexla the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Nexla? Contact Info Saket LinkedIn @saketsaurabh on Twitter Avinash LinkedIn @avinashpuri on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the

Aug 25, 202157 min

Ep 214Let Your Analysts Build A Data Lakehouse With Cuelake

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Summary Data lakes have been gaining popularity alongside an increase in their sophistication and usability. Despite improvements in performance and data architecture they still require significant knowledge and experience to deploy and manage. In this episode Vikrant Dubey discusses his work on the Cuelake project which allows data analysts to build a lakehouse with SQL queries. By building on top of Zeppelin, Spark, and Iceberg he and his team at Cuebook have built an autoscaled cloud native system that abstracts the underlying complexity. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Have you ever had to develop ad-hoc solutions for security, privacy, and compliance requirements? Are you spending too much of your engineering resources on creating database views, configuring database permissions, and manually granting and revoking access to sensitive data? Satori has built the first DataSecOps Platform that streamlines data access and security. Satori’s DataSecOps automates data access controls, permissions, and masking for all major data platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift and SQL Server and even delegates data access management to business users, helping you move your organization from default data access to need-to-know access. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/satori today and get a $5K credit for your next Satori subscription. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Vikrant Dubey about Cuebook and their Cuelake project for building ELT pipelines for your data lakehouse entirely in SQL Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Cuelake is and the story behind it? There are a number of platforms and projects for running SQL workloads and transformations on a data lake. What was lacking in those systems that you are addressing with Cuelake? Who are the target users of Cuelake and how has that influenced the features and design of the system? Can you describe how Cuelake is implemented? What was your selection process for the various components? What are some of the sharp edges that you have had to work around when integrating these components? What involved in getting Cuelake deployed? How are you using Cuelake in your work at Cuebook? Given your focus on machine learning for anomaly detection of business metrics, what are the challenges that you faced in using a data warehouse for those workloads? What are the advantages that a data lake/lakehouse architecture maintains over a warehouse? What are the shortcomings of the lake/lakehouse approach that are solved by using a warehouse? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Cuelake used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Cuelake? When is Cuelake the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Cuelake? Contact Info LinkedIn vikrantcue on GitHub @vkrntd on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your f

Aug 21, 202127 min

Ep 213Migrate And Modify Your Data Platform Confidently With Compilerworks

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Summary A major concern that comes up when selecting a vendor or technology for storing and managing your data is vendor lock-in. What happens if the vendor fails? What if the technology can’t do what I need it to? Compilerworks set out to reduce the pain and complexity of migrating between platforms, and in the process added an advanced lineage tracking capability. In this episode Shevek, CTO of Compilerworks, takes us on an interesting journey through the many technical and social complexities that are involved in evolving your data platform and the system that they have built to make it a manageable task. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Schema changes, missing data, and volume anomalies caused by your data sources can happen without any advanced notice if you lack visibility into your data-in-motion. That leaves DataOps reactive to data quality issues and can make your consumers lose confidence in your data. By connecting to your pipeline orchestrator like Apache Airflow and centralizing your end-to-end metadata, Databand.ai lets you identify data quality issues and their root causes from a single dashboard. With Databand.ai, you’ll know whether the data moving from your sources to your warehouse will be available, accurate, and usable when it arrives. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/databand to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Databand.ai and take control of your data quality today. We’ve all been asked to help with an ad-hoc request for data by the sales and marketing team. Then it becomes a critical report that they need updated every week or every day. Then what do you do? Send a CSV via email? Write some Python scripts to automate it? But what about incremental sync, API quotas, error handling, and all of the other details that eat up your time? Today, there is a better way. With Census, just write SQL or plug in your dbt models and start syncing your cloud warehouse to SaaS applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and many more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/census today to get a free 14-day trial. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Shevek about Compilerworks and his work on writing compilers to automate data lineage tracking from your SQL code Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Compilerworks is and the story behind it? What is a compiler? How are you applying compilers to the challenges of data processing systems? What are some use cases that Compilerworks is uniquely well suited to? There are a number of other methods and systems available for tracking and/or computing data lineage. What are the benefits of the approach that you are taking with Compilerworks? Can you describe the design and implementation of the Compilerworks platform? How has the system changed or evolved since you first began working on it? What programming languages and SQL dialects do you currently support? Which have been the most challenging to work with? How do you handle verification/validation of the algebraic representation of SQL code given the variability of implementations and the flexibility of the specification? Can you talk through the process of getting Compilerworks integrated into a customer’s infrastructure? What is a typical workflow for someone using Compilerworks to manage their data lineage? How does Compilerworks simplify the process of migrating between data warehouses/processing platforms? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Compilerworks used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Compilerworks? When is Compilerworks the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Compilerworks? Contact Info @shevek on GitHub Webiste Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Compilerworks Compiler ANSI SQL Spark SQL Google Flume Paper SAS Informatica Trie Data Structure Satisfiability Solver Lisp Scheme Snooker Qemu Java API The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Dat

Aug 18, 20211h 6m

Ep 212Prepare Your Unstructured Data For Machine Learning And Computer Vision Without The Toil Using Activeloop

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Summary The vast majority of data tools and platforms that you hear about are designed for working with structured, text-based data. What do you do when you need to manage unstructured information, or build a computer vision model? Activeloop was created for exactly that purpose. In this episode Davit Buniatyan, founder and CEO of Activeloop, explains why he is spending his time and energy on building a platform to simplify the work of getting your unstructured data ready for machine learning. He discusses the inefficiencies that teams run into from having to reprocess data multiple times, his work on the open source Hub library to solve this problem for everyone, and his thoughts on the vast potential that exists for using computer vision to solve hard and meaningful problems. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Have you ever had to develop ad-hoc solutions for security, privacy, and compliance requirements? Are you spending too much of your engineering resources on creating database views, configuring database permissions, and manually granting and revoking access to sensitive data? Satori has built the first DataSecOps Platform that streamlines data access and security. Satori’s DataSecOps automates data access controls, permissions, and masking for all major data platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift and SQL Server and even delegates data access management to business users, helping you move your organization from default data access to need-to-know access. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/satori today and get a $5K credit for your next Satori subscription. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Davit Buniatyan about Activeloop, a platform for hosting and delivering datasets optimized for machine learning Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Activeloop is and the story behind it? How does the form and function of data storage introduce friction in the development and deployment of machine learning projects? How does the work that you are doing at Activeloop compare to vector databases such as Pinecone? You have a focus on image oriented data and computer vision projects. How does the specific applications of ML/DL influence the format and interactions with the data? Can you describe how the Activeloop platform is architected? How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved since you began working on it? What are the feature and performance tradeoffs between self-managed storage locations (e.g. S3, GCS) and the Activeloop platform? What is the process for sourcing, processing, and storing data to be used by Hub/Activeloop? Many data assets are useful across ML/DL and analytical purposes. What are the considerations for managing the lifecycle of data between Activeloop/Hub and a data lake/warehouse? What do you see as the opportunity and effort to generalize Hub and Activeloop to support arbitrary ML frameworks/languages? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Activeloop and Hub used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Activeloop? When is Hub/Activeloop the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Activeloop? Contact Info LinkedIn @DBuniatyan on Twitter davidbuniat on GitHub Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about th

Aug 15, 202148 min

Ep 211Build Trust In Your Data By Understanding Where It Comes From And How It Is Used With Stemma

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Summary All of the fancy data platform tools and shiny dashboards that you use are pointless if the consumers of your analysis don’t have trust in the answers. Stemma helps you establish and maintain that trust by giving visibility into who is using what data, annotating the reports with useful context, and understanding who is responsible for keeping it up to date. In this episode Mark Grover explains what he is building at Stemma, how it expands on the success of the Amundsen project, and why trust is the most important asset for data teams. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! RudderStack’s smart customer data pipeline is warehouse-first. It builds your customer data warehouse and your identity graph on your data warehouse, with support for Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and more. Their SDKs and plugins make event streaming easy, and their integrations with cloud applications like Salesforce and ZenDesk help you go beyond event streaming. With RudderStack you can use all of your customer data to answer more difficult questions and then send those insights to your whole customer data stack. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder today. We’ve all been asked to help with an ad-hoc request for data by the sales and marketing team. Then it becomes a critical report that they need updated every week or every day. Then what do you do? Send a CSV via email? Write some Python scripts to automate it? But what about incremental sync, API quotas, error handling, and all of the other details that eat up your time? Today, there is a better way. With Census, just write SQL or plug in your dbt models and start syncing your cloud warehouse to SaaS applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and many more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/census today to get a free 14-day trial. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Mark Grover about his work at Stemma to bring the Amundsen project to a wider audience and increase trust in their data. Interview Introduction Can you describe what Stemma is and the story behind it? Can you give me more context into how and why Stemma fits into the current data engineering world? Among the popular tools of today for data warehousing and other products that stitch data together – what is Stemma’s place? Where does it fit into the workflow? How has the explosion in options for data cataloging and discovery influenced your thinking on the necessary feature set for that class of tools? How do you compare to your competitors With how long we have been using data and building systems to analyze it, why do you think that trust in the results is still such a momentous problem? Tell me more about Stemma and how it compares to Amundsen? Can you tell me more about the impact of Stemma/Amundsen to companies that use it? What are the opportunities for innovating on top of Stemma to help organizations streamline communication between data producers and consumers? Beyond the technological capabilities of a data platform, the bigger question is usually the social/organizational patterns around data. How have the "best practices" around the people side of data changed in the recent past? What are the points of friction that you continue to see? A majority of conversations around data catalogs and discovery are focused on analytical usage. How can these platforms be used in ML and AI workloads? How has the data engineering world changed since you left Lyft/since we last spoke? How do you see it evolving in the future? Imagine 5 years down the line and let’s say Stemma is a household name. How have data analysts’ lives improved? Data engineers? Data scientists? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Stemma used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Stemma? When is Stemma the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Stemma? Contact Info LinkedIn Email @mark_grover on Twitter Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you

Aug 10, 202152 min