Data Engineering Podcast

A Roadmap To Bootstrapping The Data Team At Your Startup

May 28th, 2023  |  42 mins 31 secs

data teams

Building a data team is hard in any circumstance, but at a startup it can be even more challenging. The requirements are fluid, you probably don't have a lot of existing data talent to manage the hiring and onboarding, and there is a need to move fast. Ghalib Suleiman has been on both sides of this equation and joins the show to share his hard-won wisdom about how to start and grow a data team in the early days of company growth.

Keep Your Data Lake Fresh With Real Time Streams Using Estuary

May 21st, 2023  |  55 mins 50 secs

Batch vs. streaming is a long running debate in the world of data integration and transformation. Proponents of the streaming paradigm argue that stream processing engines can easily handle batched workloads, but the reverse isn't true. The batch world has been the default for years because of the complexities of running a reliable streaming system at scale. In order to remove that barrier, the team at Estuary have built the Gazette and Flow systems from the ground up to resolve the pain points of other streaming engines, while providing an intuitive interface for data and application engineers to build their streaming workflows. In this episode David Yaffe and Johnny Graettinger share the story behind the business and technology and how you can start using it today to build a real-time data lake without all of the headache.

What Happens When The Abstractions Leak On Your Data

May 14th, 2023  |  26 mins 41 secs

All of the advancements in our technology is based around the principles of abstraction. These are valuable until they break down, which is an inevitable occurrence. In this episode the host Tobias Macey shares his reflections on recent experiences where the abstractions leaked and some observances on how to deal with that situation in a data platform architecture.

Use Consistent And Up To Date Customer Profiles To Power Your Business With Segment Unify

May 7th, 2023  |  54 mins 34 secs

customer data platform

Every business has customers, and a critical element of success is understanding who they are and how they are using the companies products or services. The challenge is that most companies have a multitude of systems that contain fragments of the customer's interactions and stitching that together is complex and time consuming. Segment created the Unify product to reduce the burden of building a comprehensive view of customers and synchronizing it to all of the systems that need it. In this episode Kevin Niparko and Hanhan Wang share the details of how it is implemented and how you can use it to build and maintain rich customer profiles.

Realtime Data Applications Made Easier With Meroxa

April 23rd, 2023  |  45 mins 26 secs

Real-time capabilities have quickly become an expectation for consumers. The complexity of providing those capabilities is still high, however, making it more difficult for small teams to compete. Meroxa was created to enable teams of all sizes to deliver real-time data applications. In this episode DeVaris Brown discusses the types of applications that are possible when teams don't have to manage the complex infrastructure necessary to support continuous data flows.

Building Self Serve Business Intelligence With AI And Semantic Modeling At Zenlytic

April 16th, 2023  |  49 mins 19 secs

business intelligence, semantic modeling

Business intellingence has been chasing the promise of self-serve data for decades. As the capabilities of these systems has improved and become more accessible, the target of what self-serve means changes. With the availability of AI powered by large language models combined with the evolution of semantic layers, the team at Zenlytic have taken aim at this problem again. In this episode Paul Blankley and Ryan Janssen explore the power of natural language driven data exploration combined with semantic modeling that enables an intuitive way for everyone in the business to access the data that they need to succeed in their work.

An Exploration Of The Composable Customer Data Platform

April 9th, 2023  |  1 hr 11 mins

customer data platform

The customer data platform is a category of services that was developed early in the evolution of the current era of cloud services for data processing. When it was difficult to wire together the event collection, data modeling, reporting, and activation it made sense to buy monolithic products that handled every stage of the customer data lifecycle. Now that the data warehouse has taken center stage a new approach of composable customer data platforms is emerging. In this episode Darren Haken is joined by Tejas Manohar to discuss how Autotrader UK is addressing their customer data needs by building on top of their existing data stack.

Mapping The Data Infrastructure Landscape As A Venture Capitalist

April 2nd, 2023  |  1 hr 1 min

The data ecosystem has been building momentum for several years now. As a venture capital investor Matt Turck has been trying to keep track of the main trends and has compiled his findings into the MAD (ML, AI, and Data) landscape reports each year. In this episode he shares his experiences building those reports and the perspective he has gained from the exercise.

Unlocking The Potential Of Streaming Data Applications Without The Operational Headache At Grainite

March 25th, 2023  |  1 hr 13 mins

companies, real-time, streaming

The promise of streaming data is that it allows you to react to new information as it happens, rather than introducing latency by batching records together. The peril is that building a robust and scalable streaming architecture is always more complicated and error-prone than you think it's going to be. After experiencing this unfortunate reality for themselves, Abhishek Chauhan and Ashish Kumar founded Grainite so that you don't have to suffer the same pain. In this episode they explain why streaming architectures are so challenging, how they have designed Grainite to be robust and scalable, and how you can start using it today to build your streaming data applications without all of the operational headache.

Aligning Data Security With Business Productivity To Deploy Analytics Safely And At Speed

March 18th, 2023  |  51 mins 38 secs

As with all aspects of technology, security is a critical element of data applications, and the different controls can be at cross purposes with productivity. In this episode Yoav Cohen from Satori shares his experiences as a practitioner in the space of data security and how to align with the needs of engineers and business users. He also explains why data security is distinct from application security and some methods for reducing the challenge of working across different data systems.

Use Your Data Warehouse To Power Your Product Analytics With NetSpring

March 10th, 2023  |  49 mins 21 secs

With the rise of the web and digital business came the need to understand how customers are interacting with the products and services that are being sold. Product analytics has grown into its own category and brought with it several services with generational differences in how they approach the problem. NetSpring is a warehouse-native product analytics service that allows you to gain powerful insights into your customers and their needs by combining your event streams with the rest of your business data. In this episode Priyendra Deshwal explains how NetSpring is designed to empower your product and data teams to build and explore insights around your products in a streamlined and maintainable workflow.

Exploring The Nuances Of Building An Intentional Data Culture

March 5th, 2023  |  45 mins 44 secs

The ecosystem for data professionals has matured to the point that there are a large and growing number of distinct roles. With the scope and importance of data steadily increasing it is important for organizations to ensure that everyone is aligned and operating in a positive environment. To help facilitate the nascent conversation about what constitutes an effective and productive data culture, the team at Data Council have dedicated an entire conference track to the subject. In this episode Pete Soderling and Maggie Hays join the show to explore this topic and their experience preparing for the upcoming conference.

Building A Data Mesh Platform At PayPal

February 26th, 2023  |  46 mins 54 secs

data mesh, data platform

There has been a lot of discussion about the practical application of data mesh and how to implement it in an organization. Jean-Georges Perrin was tasked with designing a new data platform implementation at PayPal and wound up building a data mesh. In this episode he shares that journey and the combination of technical and organizational challenges that he encountered in the process.

The View Below The Waterline Of Apache Iceberg And How It Fits In Your Data Lakehouse

February 19th, 2023  |  55 mins 6 secs

data lakehouse, open source

Cloud data warehouses have unlocked a massive amount of innovation and investment in data applications, but they are still inherently limiting. Because of their complete ownership of your data they constrain the possibilities of what data you can store and how it can be used. Projects like Apache Iceberg provide a viable alternative in the form of data lakehouses that provide the scalability and flexibility of data lakes, combined with the ease of use and performance of data warehouses. Ryan Blue helped create the Iceberg project, and in this episode he rejoins the show to discuss how it has evolved and what he is doing in his new business Tabular to make it even easier to implement and maintain.

Let The Whole Team Participate In Data With The Quilt Versioned Data Hub

February 11th, 2023  |  52 mins 2 secs

Data is a team sport, but it's often difficult for everyone on the team to participate. For a long time the mantra of data tools has been "by developers, for developers", which automatically excludes a large portion of the business members who play a crucial role in the success of any data project. Quilt Data was created as an answer to make it easier for everyone to contribute to the data being used by an organization and collaborate on its application. In this episode Aneesh Karve shares the journey that Quilt has taken to provide an approachable interface for working with versioned data in S3 that empowers everyone to collaborate.

Reflecting On The Past 6 Years Of Data Engineering

February 5th, 2023  |  32 mins 21 secs

This podcast started almost exactly six years ago, and the technology landscape was much different than it is now. In that time there have been a number of generational shifts in how data engineering is done. In this episode I reflect on some of the major themes and take a brief look forward at some of the upcoming changes.