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

Lucas and Luna explore how data clean rooms are transforming how companies share and analyze customer data without compromising privacy. Lucas breaks down the technical architecture — secure multiparty computation and differential privacy — and walks through a real-world case: a major retailer and an ad platform jointly analyzing purchase patterns without ever exposing raw customer IDs. Luna chall...

In this episode of The Data Business Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into the growing trend of reverse ETL—syncing data from data warehouses back into operational systems for real-time personalization. They discuss a case study of a mid-sized e-commerce company that used reverse ETL to power personalized product recommendations, resulting in a 15% lift in conversion rates. The hosts unpack the techni...

Episode 52 of The Data Business Podcast. Lucas and Luna explore how enterprise data catalogs are evolving from simple metadata registries into full-featured search and discovery platforms — essentially becoming the 'Google for your company's data.' They discuss a real-world case: how a Fortune 500 retailer with 15,000 data assets cut discovery time from hours to seconds by implementing a catalog w...

In this episode of The Data Business Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into reverse ETL—the practice of syncing transformed data from a data warehouse back into operational tools like CRMs, email platforms, and ad servers. They explore why forward-thinking data teams are using reverse ETL to power real-time personalization at scale, citing the example of a mid-market e-commerce company that reduced car...

Episode 50 of The Data Business Podcast. Lucas and Luna dive into federated learning — a technique where machine learning models train across decentralized data without raw data ever leaving its source. They explore a concrete case: how a major hospital network used federated learning to collaborate with pharmaceutical partners on drug discovery while keeping patient records legally compliant. The...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the emerging trend of data teams building internal AI copilots—custom conversational interfaces trained on proprietary enterprise data. They examine the case of a mid-size logistics company that built a 'Supply Chain Brain' using its own shipment, weather, and inventory data, cutting query time from hours to seconds. The hosts discuss the key architectural c...

Lucas and Luna explore how data products — self-contained, reusable data assets with defined quality SLAs — are displacing traditional enterprise software. They examine a real case: how a mid-market retailer replaced its customer analytics suite with an internal data product built on Snowflake and dbt, cutting costs by 40 percent while giving business teams self-serve access. They also discuss why...

Episode 47 of The Data Business Podcast dives into the hidden failure of data contracts at a Fortune 500 retailer. Lucas and Luna examine why this well-hyped pattern for governing data exchange between teams fell apart in practice — and what actually fixed the pipeline. The episode centers on a specific case: a major retailer with over 200 data producers and 1,500 consumers. After a year-long roll...

Data contracts are becoming a practical tool for reducing integration time between teams, and Lucas and Luna dig into the specifics. They look at how companies like Uber and a mid-sized logistics firm cut months off data-sharing projects by defining schemas, SLAs, and expectations upfront. Lucas explains the three components of a data contract—schema guarantees, semantic rules, and service-level o...

In episode 45 of The Data Business Podcast, Lucas and Luna tackle a question that keeps data engineers up at night: why do data pipelines break silently and what's the fix? They drill into the concept of data observability with a feedback loop back into production — moving beyond monitoring dashboards to automated corrective actions. Using a concrete example from a mid-size e-commerce company that...

Lucas and Luna explore the rise of reverse ETL — the practice of syncing data from a warehouse back into operational tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, and HubSpot. They break down how companies like Sanity and a fictional e-commerce brand use reverse ETL to power real-time customer personalization, cut query costs, and reduce engineering bottlenecks. With specific numbers on latency reduction and te...

Episode 43 explores how the data mesh operating model is transforming enterprise data teams. Lucas and Luna break down the four core principles of data mesh—domain ownership, data as a product, self-serve data platform, and federated governance—using a detailed example from a global retailer. They discuss how this shift changes team structures, reduces bottlenecks, and enables domain-specific data...

Episode 42 of The Data Business Podcast dives into data observability—the practice of monitoring data pipelines for quality, freshness, and lineage in real time. Lucas and Luna explore a specific case: how a fintech company reduced data incident resolution time from four hours to eleven minutes using open-source tools like Great Expectations and custom dashboards on Databricks. They discuss the di...

Episode 41 of The Data Business Podcast. Lucas and Luna explore why internal data product adoption is the new frontier for enterprise data teams. They examine a case study from a global retailer that built a cross-functional data marketplace for its own business units, achieving 40% faster time-to-insight. The hosts discuss the key design principles: treating internal users like external customers...

Episode 40 of The Data Business Podcast explores the shift from centralized data platforms to the data mesh operating model. Lucas and Luna unpack Zhamak Dehghani's original 2019 thesis, contrast it with earlier lakehouse and data warehouse approaches, and examine how organizations like Intuit and PayPal have adopted domain-oriented data ownership. They discuss the four core principles of data mes...

Data contracts—agreed-upon schemas and SLAs between data producers and consumers—are quietly reshaping how large companies manage data pipelines. This episode unpacks why enterprises are moving from informal data handoffs to legally-binding data contracts, using examples from a major European retailer that cut integration time by 40% after adopting them. We explain how data contracts reduce miscom...

Episode 38 of The Data Business Podcast: Lucas and Luna dig into why a growing number of enterprise data teams are replacing traditional REST APIs with data contracts — formal agreements between data producers and consumers that specify schema, semantics, SLAs, and expected usage. They unpack a real case from a mid-sized fintech that cut downstream incidents by 40 percent after switching to contra...

Feature stores have quietly become one of the most important pieces of data infrastructure for machine learning teams. Lucas and Luna explore how companies like Uber, Airbnb, and DoorDash use feature stores to avoid duplicating work, reduce time-to-deployment, and operationalize ML at scale. They dive into the specific problem of 'training-serving skew', the rise of open-source tools like Feast, a...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how metadata lakehouses are emerging as a new architectural layer that unifies data discovery across fragmented enterprise data landscapes. They discuss how companies like Atlassian and Uber have used this approach to reduce data discovery time by 40 percent, and contrast it with earlier metadata management strategies like data catalogs and data mesh. The co...

Episode 35 of The Data Business Podcast dives into a quiet revolution in enterprise compliance: data lineage. Lucas and Luna explore how the European Central Bank's new digital reporting framework and the SEC's 2025 cybersecurity disclosure rules are forcing companies to track every data point from ingestion to dashboard. They break down why a major European insurer recently spent $12 million retr...

Episode 34 of The Data Business Podcast explores how data version control systems—inspired by software engineering's Git—are becoming critical for enterprise AI teams. Lucas and Luna discuss the real-world case of a fintech company that used data versioning to recover from a corrupted training dataset, saving six months of rework. They break down the key players, from DVC to LakeFS, and explain wh...

Episode 33 of The Data Business Podcast explores how enterprise data teams are shifting from custom one-off integrations to buying and selling data products through internal and external marketplaces. Lucas and Luna examine Snowflake's Marketplace, which now hosts over 2,000 third-party data listings and processes millions in monthly transactions, and compare it to AWS Data Exchange. They discuss...

Episode 32: Lucas and Luna dive into how data contracts are transforming enterprise software pricing. Through the lens of Snowflake's recent shift to consumption-based pricing and Databricks' new unit-based model, they explore why static subscription tiers are giving way to dynamic pricing tied to data volume and quality. They discuss the role of data contracts in enabling this shift, the challeng...

Episode 31 explores a surprising shift in the data world: data catalogs are evolving from passive inventory tools into the active operating layer for enterprise data. Lucas unpacks how Databricks, Snowflake, and startups like Alation and Atlan are racing to build the 'control plane' for data, embedding governance, discovery, and lineage directly into the query path. Luna challenges whether this is...

Episode 30 of The Data Business Podcast. Lucas and Luna explore the emerging discipline of data valuation and how it's reshaping mergers and acquisitions. They dive into the 2025 acquisition of a mid-market AI firm where the target's synthetic data library was valued at $47 million — more than its software stack. The hosts discuss the SEC's evolving stance on data as a balance-sheet asset, the acc...