The Data Business Podcast with Fexingo: Analytics, Data Infrastructure, and Information Products

In this episode of The Data Business Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into how data teams are leveraging dbt's Semantic Layer to power embedded analytics inside customer-facing products. They break down a specific case: a mid-market SaaS company that replaced a homegrown API layer with dbt's Semantic Layer to serve consistent metrics across their web app and customer dashboards. Lucas walks through th...

Episode 103 of The Data Business Podcast explores data compaction for Apache Iceberg tables—a technique that merges small files into larger ones to improve query performance and reduce storage costs. Lucas and Luna break down why compaction matters, using a real example from a mid-size e-commerce company that cut its Athena query costs by 40 percent after adopting a nightly compaction routine. The...

Episode 102 of The Data Business Podcast explores a quiet shift in modern data architecture: tiered storage for Apache Iceberg tables. Lucas and Luna discuss why mature data teams are separating hot, warm, and cold data paths — not just for cost, but for query performance and governance. They break down the economics: how one mid-size e-commerce firm cut its monthly S3 bill by 34 percent by moving...

Episode 101 of The Data Business Podcast. Lucas and Luna drill into the growing practice of using data contracts to guarantee API reliability between producers and consumers. They examine how a mid-market fintech called Helios Payment cut downstream pipeline failures by 38% in Q2 2026 by adopting schema-level contracts with automated validation. Lucas explains why traditional SLAs miss the mark, h...

In this milestone 100th episode, Lucas and Luna explore how forward-thinking data teams are implementing semantic layers to bridge the gap between raw data and business users. They examine the case of a mid-sized e-commerce company that reduced dashboard creation time by 60 percent after adopting a semantic layer built on dbt and Looker. The conversation covers the architectural shift from direct...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore why data teams are increasingly adopting data contracts—formal agreements between data producers and consumers that specify schema, freshness, and semantic guarantees. They dive into how companies like Uber and Airbnb use data contracts to reduce pipeline failures and improve trust, citing a 40% reduction in broken downstream reports at one mid-size fintech....

Episode 98 of The Data Business Podcast explores how data teams are increasingly turning to synthetic data generation to test pipelines more safely and thoroughly. Lucas and Luna dive into a specific case: a mid-sized e-commerce company that cut its data pipeline failure rate by 60 percent after adopting synthetic data for pre-production testing. They discuss the key tools and techniques, includin...

Episode 97 of The Data Business Podcast dives into why data lineage is becoming a compliance necessity. Lucas and Luna unpack how JPMorgan Chase built a column-level lineage system to automate regulatory reporting under BCBS 239, saving thousands of engineer hours. They discuss the trade-offs between parsing SQL versus using OpenLineage hooks, why business glossaries and tags matter for regulators...

Data platform migrations are everywhere — from on-premise to cloud, from legacy warehouses to lakehouses. But most teams focus on the destination technology and underestimate the complexity of the move itself. In this episode, Lucas and Luna examine a specific case: a mid-sized fintech company that migrated from a Teradata appliance to Snowflake over 18 months. They break down where the plan broke...

Episode 95 of The Data Business Podcast explores the rise of metric stores—centralized repositories for business definitions that bridge engineering and analytics. Lucas and Luna discuss how companies like Airbnb and a mid-sized fintech called PayFlow use metric stores to eliminate metric drift, reduce reporting reconciliation time, and ensure KPIs like net revenue retention are consistent across...

Episode 94 of The Data Business Podcast dives into column-level lineage — the metadata practice that maps how individual data fields flow through pipelines, transforms, and dashboards. Lucas and Luna explore a real example: a mid-sized fintech, PayFlow, which needed to prove to auditors that a single field — 'transaction_risk_score' — was computed correctly across 14 downstream reports. They walk...

Episode 93 of The Data Business Podcast dives into change data capture, or CDC, and how data teams are using it to move from batch to real-time analytics without rewriting their entire stack. Lucas and Luna break down a concrete case: a mid-market e-commerce company that used CDC to cut its analytics latency from 24 hours to under 30 seconds, with a total cost of ownership about 40 percent lower t...

Episode 92 of The Data Business Podcast. Lucas and Luna explore how companies like Canva and Notion are embedding analytics directly into their products — not just for internal dashboards but as a growth lever. They break down the difference between traditional BI and embedded analytics, why product-led data access reduces churn, and the architecture choices teams face: iframe vs. SDK vs. custom A...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna discuss how feature stores are transforming machine learning pipelines by providing a centralized repository for reusable, consistent features. They dive into the example of a mid-sized e-commerce company that reduced model deployment time by 40% after adopting a feature store. The hosts explore key benefits like feature reuse, consistency between training and servi...

In Episode 90 of The Data Business Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into the emerging practice of proactive data profiling—running automated checks on raw data before it enters transformation pipelines. They use a concrete case: a mid-sized e-commerce company that reduced data breakage incidents by 60 percent in three months by implementing pre-ingestion profiling checks using an open-source framework...

Episode 89 of The Data Business Podcast dives into a topic every data team grapples with: cloud cost attribution. Lucas and Luna break down how modern data teams are moving beyond simple aggregate billing to granular cost allocation per pipeline, per query, and per user. They explore a real-world case where a mid-market fintech used Snowflake's resource monitors and cost allocation tags to cut its...

Episode 88 of The Data Business Podcast explores how data teams are adopting data observability to rebuild trust in their pipelines. Lucas and Luna dive into a specific case: a mid-sized e-commerce company that reduced data incident detection time from hours to under four minutes using a three-pillar observability stack—freshness, volume, and schema monitoring. They discuss the cost of bad data, t...

Episode 87 of The Data Business Podcast explores how data teams are leveraging dbt not just for transformation but for cost optimization. Lucas kicks off with a specific example: a mid-market fintech company that reduced its Snowflake compute bill by 18% within two quarters by implementing dbt models designed to monitor and flag inefficient queries. Luna digs into the tactical details — how the te...

Episode 86 of The Data Business Podcast explores how data teams are adopting data mesh principles to distribute ownership across domains. Lucas and Luna examine a real case: a mid-sized e-commerce company that moved from a centralized data team to domain-specific data products, cutting time-to-insight by 40 percent. They discuss the role of data contracts in enabling this shift, the challenges of...

Reverse ETL is becoming a critical tool for data teams looking to push insights from their warehouse into operational systems like CRMs, ad platforms, and support tools. In this episode, Lucas and Luna dig into a real case: how a mid-market e-commerce company used reverse ETL to sync customer churn predictions straight into Salesforce, reducing manual data exports and improving retention campaign...

Most data teams trust their dashboards until a numbers mismatch costs the company real money. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how a mid-market fintech called SynapsePay built observable pipelines that capture every transformation step — not just whether the job ran, but exactly how the data changed. We walk through the team's early struggles with duplicate transaction records, their shift...

Episode 83 of The Data Business Podcast dives into the practical uses of vector embeddings for semantic search in enterprise data environments. Lucas and Luna explore how companies like Shopify have leveraged embeddings to power product discovery and internal knowledge retrieval, reducing search-to-purchase time by 12 percent. They break down the technical trade-offs between dense and sparse embed...

Episode 82 of The Data Business Podcast. Lucas and Luna explore why enterprise data catalogs often fail at the most basic function: helping people find the right dataset. They drill into the difference between metadata search and semantic search, using the example of a large retailer that spent $2.4 million on a commercial catalog tool only to discover analysts still couldn't find their own tables...

Episode 81 of The Data Business Podcast. Lucas and Luna explore how open table formats—Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Apache Hudi—are reshaping the data lakehouse landscape. They focus on Iceberg's rise to dominance, the engineering decision at Netflix that kicked it off, and why the format war matters for anyone building a modern data stack. Specific numbers: Iceberg adoption grew from 15 percen...

Episode 80 of The Data Business Podcast explores how data teams are using schema-on-read validation to catch pipeline failures before they corrupt downstream analytics. Lucas and Luna discuss a real case at a mid-sized e-commerce company where a misclassified field in a Parquet file caused a $200,000 reporting error. They break down the difference between schema-on-write and schema-on-read, explai...