Data Engineering Podcast

Summary The majority of analytics platforms are focused on use internal to an organization by business stakeholders. As the availability of data increases and overall literacy in how to interpret it and take action improves there is a growing need to bring business intelligence use cases to a broader audience. GoodData is a platform focused on simplifying the work of bringing data to employees and...

Summary Machine learning is a process driven by iteration and experimentation which requires fast and easy access to relevant features of the data being processed. In order to reduce friction in the process of developing and delivering models there has been a recent trend toward building a dedicated feature. In this episode Simba Khadder discusses his work at StreamSQL building a feature store to...

Summary The landscape of data management and processing is rapidly changing and evolving. There are certain foundational elements that have remained steady, but as the industry matures new trends emerge and gain prominence. In this episode Astasia Myers of Redpoint Ventures shares her perspective as an investor on which categories she is paying particular attention to for the near to medium term....

Summary Data lakes offer a great deal of flexibility and the potential for reduced cost for your analytics, but they also introduce a great deal of complexity. What used to be entirely managed by the database engine is now a composition of multiple systems that need to be properly configured to work in concert. In order to bring the DBA into the new era of data management the team at Upsolver adde...

Summary Gaining a complete view of the customer journey is especially difficult in B2B companies. This is due to the number of different individuals involved and the myriad ways that they interface with the business. Dreamdata integrates data from the multitude of platforms that are used by these organizations so that they can get a comprehensive view of their customer lifecycle. In this episode O...

Summary The PostgreSQL database is massively popular due to its flexibility and extensive ecosystem of extensions, but it is still not the first choice for high performance analytics. Swarm64 aims to change that by adding support for advanced hardware capabilities like FPGAs and optimized usage of modern SSDs. In this episode CEO and co-founder Thomas Richter discusses his motivation for creating...

Summary There have been several generations of platforms for managing streaming data, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and different areas of focus. Pulsar is one of the recent entrants which has quickly gained adoption and an impressive set of capabilities. In this episode Sijie Guo discusses his motivations for spending so much of his time and energy on contributing to the project a...

Summary Data management is hard at any scale, but working in the context of an enterprise organization adds even greater complexity. Infoworks is a platform built to provide a unified set of tooling for managing the full lifecycle of data in large businesses. By reducing the barrier to entry with a graphical interface for defining data transformations and analysis, it makes it easier to bring the...

Summary Data is a critical element to every role in an organization, which is also what makes managing it so challenging. With so many different opinions about which pieces of information are most important, how it needs to be accessed, and what to do with it, many data projects are doomed to failure. In this episode Chris Bergh explains how taking an agile approach to delivering value can drive d...

Summary Modern applications frequently require access to real-time data, but building and maintaining the systems that make that possible is a complex and time consuming endeavor. Eventador is a managed platform designed to let you focus on using the data that you collect, without worrying about how to make it reliable. In this episode Eventador Founder and CEO Kenny Gorman describes how the platf...

Summary The software applications that we build for our businesses are a rich source of data, but accessing and extracting that data is often a slow and error-prone process. Rookout has built a platform to separate the data collection process from the lifecycle of your code. In this episode, CTO Liran Haimovitch discusses the benefits of shortening the iteration cycle and bringing non-engineers in...

Summary Knowledge graphs are a data resource that can answer questions beyond the scope of traditional data analytics. By organizing and storing data to emphasize the relationship between entities, we can discover the complex connections between multiple sources of information. In this episode John Maiden talks about how Cherre builds knowledge graphs that provide powerful insights for their custo...

Summary Building and maintaining a system that integrates and analyzes all of the data for your organization is a complex endeavor. Operating on a shoe-string budget makes it even more challenging. In this episode Tyler Colby shares his experiences working as a data professional in the non-profit sector. From managing Salesforce data models to wrangling a multitude of data sources and compliance c...

Summary There are a number of platforms available for object storage, including self-managed open source projects. But what goes on behind the scenes of the companies that run these systems at scale so you don’t have to? In this episode Will Smith shares the journey that he and his team at Linode recently completed to bring a fast and reliable S3 compatible object storage to production for y...

Summary CouchDB is a distributed document database built for scale and ease of operation. With a built-in synchronization protocol and a HTTP interface it has become popular as a backend for web and mobile applications. Created 15 years ago, it has accrued some technical debt which is being addressed with a refactored architecture based on FoundationDB. In this episode Adam Kocoloski shares the hi...

Summary Data governance is a complex endeavor, but scaling it to meet the needs of a complex or globally distributed organization requires a well considered and coherent strategy. In this episode Tim Ward describes an architecture that he has used successfully with multiple organizations to scale compliance. By treating it as a graph problem, where each hub in the network has localized control wit...

Summary Building applications on top of unbounded event streams is a complex endeavor, requiring careful integration of multiple disparate systems that were engineered in isolation. The ksqlDB project was created to address this state of affairs by building a unified layer on top of the Kafka ecosystem for stream processing. Developers can work with the SQL constructs that they are familiar with w...

Summary Misaligned priorities across business units can lead to tensions that drive members of the organization to build data and analytics projects without the guidance or support of engineering or IT staff. The availability of cloud platforms and managed services makes this a viable option, but can lead to downstream challenges. In this episode Sean Knapp and Charlie Crocker share their experien...

Summary One of the biggest challenges in building reliable platforms for processing event pipelines is managing the underlying infrastructure. At Snowplow Analytics the complexity is compounded by the need to manage multiple instances of their platform across customer environments. In this episode Josh Beemster, the technical operations lead at Snowplow, explains how they manage automation, deploy...

Summary Designing the structure for your data warehouse is a complex and challenging process. As businesses deal with a growing number of sources and types of information that they need to integrate, they need a data modeling strategy that provides them with flexibility and speed. Data Vault is an approach that allows for evolving a data model in place without requiring destructive transformations...

Summary Every business collects data in some fashion, but sometimes the true value of the collected information only comes when it is combined with other data sources. Data trusts are a legal framework for allowing businesses to collaboratively pool their data. This allows the members of the trust to increase the value of their individual repositories and gain new insights which would otherwise re...

Summary Data pipelines are complicated and business critical pieces of technical infrastructure. Unfortunately they are also complex and difficult to test, leading to a significant amount of technical debt which contributes to slower iteration cycles. In this episode James Campbell describes how he helped create the Great Expectations framework to help you gain control and confidence in your data...

Summary Building a reliable data platform is a neverending task. Even if you have a process that works for you and your business there can be unexpected events that require a change in your platform architecture. In this episode the head of data for Mayvenn shares their experience migrating an existing set of streaming workflows onto the Ascend platform after their previous vendor was acquired and...

Summary The modern era of software development is identified by ubiquitous access to elastic infrastructure for computation and easy automation of deployment. This has led to a class of applications that can quickly scale to serve users worldwide. This requires a new class of data storage which can accomodate that demand without having to rearchitect your system at each level of growth. YugabyteDB...

Summary Databases are useful for inspecting the current state of your application, but inspecting the history of that data can get messy without a way to track changes as they happen. Debezium is an open source platform for reliable change data capture that you can use to build supplemental systems for everything from maintaining audit trails to real-time updates of your data warehouse. In this ep...