EXPLAIN ANALYZE

AI is moving inside the database, and it keeps hitting problems databases already solved. Stephanie Wang (staff engineer at MongoDB, founding engineer at MotherDuck) joins Mehdi and Jacob Matson to dig into Snowflake's Cortex AISQL and why AI inside SQL is really a query-optimization and cost problem, the compute crunch pushing RAM and inference prices up, RadAgents and Sakana's Fugu model router,...

Yan Holtz, the data viz educator behind data-to-viz.com and the R/Python/D3 graph galleries, joins Mehdi and Alex for a full episode on data visualization in the age of AI. AI has basically solved the "how do I write the code" problem, which makes the "what makes a good chart" problem matter more than ever - and it's quietly pushing all serious data viz toward JavaScript and D3, even for R and Pyt...

Infrastructure keeps winning the funding while SaaS bleeds — but is it sustainable when AI agents spin up databases that die in days? Mehdi and Jacob Matson dig into Supabase's Series F, local AI on personal chips, DuckDB turning up everywhere (MariaDB, MondayDB HTAP), Anthropic's "data is not software" claim, and a wave of people building software just for themselves. Show notes & links : htt...

Daniel Beach (Data Engineering Central) joins Mehdi and Dumky for a tour through the open lakehouse renaissance, AI-native data agents, and the slow grind of getting humans out of the orchestration loop. We cover the catalog commits feature in Delta + Unity Catalog + DuckDB (multi-writer lakehouse without Spark), Cloudflare's new unified data platform and their AI agent Skipper, ADBC quietly repla...

Mehdi (DevRel) and Dumky (Developer Experience) at MotherDuck run through ~10 links from the world of data and AI. This one keeps circling back to a single theme: as AI makes everything easier to produce, the hard part becomes telling the real signal from the slop, whether that's music, GitHub stars, or your data warehouse answers. All links: motherduck.com/explain-analyze : subscribe there to get...

First episode. Bun ditches Zig for Rust, Anthropic pulls the rug on pricing, agents are rewriting how databases work, and open source maintainers are drowning. Mehdi and Alex pick apart the AI tooling wars and why your brain feels fried. Show notes : https://motherduck.com/explain-analyze/ 00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Bun's Rewrite 03:10 The Shift from Zig to Rust in Bun 05:52 AI's Impact...