Latest Episodes

Data Infrastructure Automation For Private SaaS At Snowplow - Episode 120

February 18, 2020 tmacey

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, deployment, monitoring, scaling, and maintenance of their streaming analytics pipeline for event data. He also shares the challenges they face in supporting multiple cloud environments and the need to integrate with existing customer systems. If...

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Data Modeling That Evolves With Your Business Using Data Vault - Episode 119

February 9, 2020 tmacey

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 and massive up front design to answer valuable questions. In this episode Kent Graziano shares his journey with data vault, explains how it allows for an agile...

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The Benefits And Challenges Of Building A Data Trust - Episode 118

February 3, 2020 tmacey

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 require substantial effort in duplicating the data owned by their peers. In this episode Tom Plagge and Greg Mundy explain how the BrightHive platform serves to establish...

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Pay Down Technical Debt In Your Data Pipeline With Great Expectations - Episode 117

January 27, 2020 tmacey

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 delivery workflows, the challenges of validating and monitoring the quality and accuracy of your data, and how you can use it in your own environments to improve your ability to move...

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Replatforming Production Dataflows - Episode 116

January 20, 2020 tmacey

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 changed their offering. This is an interesting discussion about the ongoing maintenance and decision making required to keep your business data up to date...

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Planet Scale SQL For The New Generation Of Applications - Episode 115

January 13, 2020 tmacey

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 is an open source database designed to support planet scale workloads with high data density and full ACID compliance. In this episode Karthik Ranganathan explains how Yugabyte...

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Change Data Capture For All Of Your Databases With Debezium - Episode 114

January 6, 2020 tmacey

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 episode Gunnar Morling and Randall Hauch explain why it got started, how it works, and some of the myriad ways that you can use it....

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Building The DataDog Platform For Processing Timeseries Data At Massive Scale - Episode 113

December 30, 2019 tmacey

DataDog is one of the most successful companies in the space of metrics and monitoring for servers and cloud infrastructure. In order to support their customers, they need to capture, process, and analyze massive amounts of timeseries data with a high degree of uptime and reliability. Vadim Semenov works on their data engineering team and joins the podcast in this episode to discuss the challenges that he works through, the systems that DataDog has built to power their business, and how their teams are organized to allow for rapid...

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Building The Materialize Engine For Interactive Streaming Analytics In SQL - Episode 112

December 23, 2019 tmacey

Transactional databases used in applications are optimized for fast reads and writes with relatively simple queries on a small number of records. Data warehouses are optimized for batched writes and complex analytical queries. Between those use cases there are varying levels of support for fast reads on quickly changing data. To address that need more completely the team at Materialize has created an engine that allows for building queryable views of your data as it is continually updated from the stream of changes being generated by your applications. In...

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Solving Data Lineage Tracking And Data Discovery At WeWork - Episode 111

December 16, 2019 tmacey

Building clean datasets with reliable and reproducible ingestion pipelines is completely useless if it's not possible to find them and understand their provenance. The solution to discoverability and tracking of data lineage is to incorporate a metadata repository into your data platform. The metadata repository serves as a data catalog and a means of reporting on the health and status of your datasets when it is properly integrated into the rest of your tools. At WeWork they needed a system that would provide visibility into their Airflow pipelines and...

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