Data Engineering Podcast

Summary As a data engineer you’re familiar with the process of collecting data from databases, customer data platforms, APIs, etc. At YipitData they rely on a variety of alternative data sources to inform investment decisions by hedge funds and businesses. In this episode Andrew Gross, Bobby Muldoon, and Anup Segu describe the self service data platform that they have built to allow data ana...

Summary Building data products are complicated by the fact that there are so many different stakeholders with competing goals and priorities. It is also challenging because of the number of roles and capabilities that are necessary to go from idea to delivery. Different organizations have tried a multitude of organizational strategies to improve the success rate of these data teams with varying le...

Summary The first stage of every good pipeline is to perform data integration. With the increasing pace of change and the need for up to date analytics the need to integrate that data in near real time is growing. With the improvements and increased variety of options for streaming data engines and improved tools for change data capture it is possible for data teams to make that goal a reality. Ho...

Summary One of the oldest aphorisms about data is "garbage in, garbage out", which is why the current boom in data quality solutions is no surprise. With the growth in projects, platforms, and services that aim to help you establish and maintain control of the health and reliability of your data pipelines it can be overwhelming to stay up to date with how they all compare. In this episod...

Summary The core mission of data engineers is to provide the business with a way to ask and answer questions of their data. This often takes the form of business intelligence dashboards, machine learning models, or APIs on top of a cleaned and curated data set. Despite the rapid progression of impressive tools and products built to fulfill this mission, it is still an uphill battle to tie everythi...

Summary A data catalog is a critical piece of infrastructure for any organization who wants to build analytics products, whether internal or external. While there are a number of platforms available for building that catalog, many of them are either difficult to deploy and integrate, or expensive to use at scale. In this episode Grant Seward explains how he built Tree Schema to be an easy to use a...

Summary Data lakes are gaining popularity due to their flexibility and reduced cost of storage. Along with the benefits there are some additional complexities to consider, including how to safely integrate new data sources or test out changes to existing pipelines. In order to address these challenges the team at Treeverse created LakeFS to introduce version control capabilities to your storage la...

Summary One of the most challenging aspects of building a data platform has nothing to do with pipelines and transformations. If you are putting your workflows into production, then you need to consider how you are going to implement data security, including access controls and auditing. Different databases and storage systems all have their own method of restricting access, and they are not all c...

Summary In order for analytics and machine learning projects to be useful, they require a high degree of data quality. To ensure that your pipelines are healthy you need a way to make them observable. In this episode Barr Moses and Lior Gavish, co-founders of Monte Carlo, share the leading causes of what they refer to as data downtime and how it manifests. They also discuss methods for gaining vis...

Summary Business intelligence efforts are only as useful as the outcomes that they inform. Power BI aims to reduce the time and effort required to go from information to action by providing an interface that encourages rapid iteration. In this episode Rob Collie shares his enthusiasm for the Power BI platform and how it stands out from other options. He explains how he helped to build the platform...

Summary Analytical workloads require a well engineered and well maintained data integration process to ensure that your information is reliable and up to date. Building a real-time pipeline for your data lakes and data warehouses is a non-trivial effort, requiring a substantial investment of time and energy. Meroxa is a new platform that aims to automate the heavy lifting of change data capture, m...

Summary Kafka has become a de facto standard interface for building decoupled systems and working with streaming data. Despite its widespread popularity, there are numerous accounts of the difficulty that operators face in keeping it reliable and performant, or trying to scale an installation. To make the benefits of the Kafka ecosystem more accessible and reduce the operational burden, Alexander...

Summary Data engineering is a constantly growing and evolving discipline. There are always new tools, systems, and design patterns to learn, which leads to a great deal of confusion for newcomers. Daniel Molnar has dedicated his time to helping data professionals get back to basics through presentations at conferences and meetups, and with his most recent endeavor of building the Pipeline Data Eng...

Summary In memory computing provides significant performance benefits, but brings along challenges for managing failures and scaling up. Hazelcast is a platform for managing stateful in-memory storage and computation across a distributed cluster of commodity hardware. On top of this foundation, the Hazelcast team has also built a streaming platform for reliable high throughput data transmission. I...

Summary Databases are limited in scope to the information that they directly contain. For analytical use cases you often want to combine data across multiple sources and storage locations. This frequently requires cumbersome and time-consuming data integration. To address this problem Martin Traverso and his colleagues at Facebook built the Presto distributed query engine. In this episode he expla...

Summary Data warehouse technology has been around for decades and has gone through several generational shifts in that time. The current trends in data warehousing are oriented around cloud native architectures that take advantage of dynamic scaling and the separation of compute and storage. Firebolt is taking that a step further with a core focus on speed and interactivity. In this episode CEO an...

Summary In order to scale the use of data across an organization there are a number of challenges related to discovery, governance, and integration that need to be solved. The key to those solutions is a robust and flexible metadata management system. LinkedIn has gone through several iterations on the most maintainable and scalable approach to metadata, leading them to their current work on DataH...

Summary Most databases are designed to work with textual data, with some special purpose engines that support domain specific formats. TileDB is a data engine that was built to support every type of data by using multi-dimensional arrays as the foundational primitive. In this episode the creator and founder of TileDB shares how he first started working on the underlying technology and the benefits...

Summary Event based data is a rich source of information for analytics, unless none of the event structures are consistent. The team at Iteratively are building a platform to manage the end to end flow of collaboration around what events are needed, how to structure the attributes, and how they are captured. In this episode founders Patrick Thompson and Ondrej Hrebicek discuss the problems that th...

Summary Finding connections between data and the entities that they represent is a complex problem. Graph data models and the applications built on top of them are perfect for representing relationships and finding emergent structures in your information. In this episode Denise Gosnell and Matthias Broecheler discuss their recent book, the Practitioner’s Guide To Graph Data, including the fu...

Summary A majority of the scalable data processing platforms that we rely on are built as distributed systems. This brings with it a vast number of subtle ways that errors can creep in. Kyle Kingsbury created the Jepsen framework for testing the guarantees of distributed data processing systems and identifying when and why they break. In this episode he shares his approach to testing complex syste...

Summary Wind energy is an important component of an ecologically friendly power system, but there are a number of variables that can affect the overall efficiency of the turbines. Michael Tegtmeier founded Turbit Systems to help operators of wind farms identify and correct problems that contribute to suboptimal power outputs. In this episode he shares the story of how he got started working with w...

Summary The first stage of every data pipeline is extracting the information from source systems. There are a number of platforms for managing data integration, but there is a notable lack of a robust and easy to use open source option. The Meltano project is aiming to provide a solution to that situation. In this episode, project lead Douwe Maan shares the history of how Meltano got started, the...

Summary There are an increasing number of use cases for real time data, and the systems to power them are becoming more mature. Once you have a streaming platform up and running you need a way to keep an eye on it, including observability, discovery, and governance of your data. That’s what the Lenses.io DataOps platform is built for. In this episode CTO Andrew Stevenson discusses the challe...

Summary We have machines that can listen to and process human speech in a variety of languages, but dealing with unstructured sounds in our environment is a much greater challenge. The team at Audio Analytic are working to impart a sense of hearing to our myriad devices with their sound recognition technology. In this episode Dr. Chris Mitchell and Dr. Thomas le Cornu describe the challenges that...