Data Engineering Podcast
Weekly deep dives on data management with the engineers and entrepreneurs who are shaping the industry
About the show
This show goes behind the scenes for the tools, techniques, and difficulties associated with the discipline of data engineering. Databases, workflows, automation, and data manipulation are just some of the topics that you will find here.
Episodes
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Adding An Easy Mode For The Modern Data Stack With 5X
December 17th, 2023 | 56 mins 12 secs
The "modern data stack" promised a scalable, composable data platform that gave everyone the flexibility to use the best tools for every job. The reality was that it left data teams in the position of spending all of their engineering effort on integrating systems that weren't designed with compatible user experiences. The team at 5X understand the pain involved and the barriers to productivity and set out to solve it by pre-integrating the best tools from each layer of the stack. In this episode founder Tarush Aggarwal explains how the realities of the modern data stack are impacting data teams and the work that they are doing to accelerate time to value.
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Run Your Own Anomaly Detection For Your Critical Business Metrics With Anomstack
December 10th, 2023 | 51 mins 17 secs
If your business metrics looked weird tomorrow, would you know about it first? Anomaly detection is focused on identifying those outliers for you, so that you are the first to know when a business critical dashboard isn't right. Unfortunately, it can often be complex or expensive to incorporate anomaly detection into your data platform. Andrew Maguire got tired of solving that problem for each of the different roles he has ended up in, so he created the open source Anomstack project. In this episode he shares what it is, how it works, and how you can start using it today to get notified when the critical metrics in your business aren't quite right.
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Designing Data Transfer Systems That Scale
December 4th, 2023 | 1 hr 3 mins
The first step of data pipelines is to move the data to a place where you can process and prepare it for its eventual purpose. Data transfer systems are a critical component of data enablement, and building them to support large volumes of information is a complex endeavor. Andrei Tserakhau has dedicated his careeer to this problem, and in this episode he shares the lessons that he has learned and the work he is doing on his most recent data transfer system at DoubleCloud.
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Addressing The Challenges Of Component Integration In Data Platform Architectures
November 26th, 2023 | 29 mins 42 secs
Building a data platform that is enjoyable and accessible for all of its end users is a substantial challenge. One of the core complexities that needs to be addressed is the fractal set of integrations that need to be managed across the individual components. In this episode Tobias Macey shares his thoughts on the challenges that he is facing as he prepares to build the next set of architectural layers for his data platform to enable a larger audience to start accessing the data being managed by his team.
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Unlocking Your dbt Projects With Practical Advice For Practitioners
November 19th, 2023 | 1 hr 16 mins
The dbt project has become overwhelmingly popular across analytics and data engineering teams. While it is easy to adopt, there are many potential pitfalls. Dustin Dorsey and Cameron Cyr co-authored a practical guide to building your dbt project. In this episode they share their hard-won wisdom about how to build and scale your dbt projects.
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Enhancing The Abilities Of Software Engineers With Generative AI At Tabnine
November 12th, 2023 | 1 hr 7 mins
Software development involves an interesting balance of creativity and repetition of patterns. Generative AI has accelerated the ability of developer tools to provide useful suggestions that speed up the work of engineers. Tabnine is one of the main platforms offering an AI powered assistant for software engineers. In this episode Eran Yahav shares the journey that he has taken in building this product and the ways that it enhances the ability of humans to get their work done, and when the humans have to adapt to the tool.
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Shining Some Light In The Black Box Of PostgreSQL Performance
November 5th, 2023 | 54 mins 51 secs
Databases are the core of most applications, but they are often treated as inscrutable black boxes. When an application is slow, there is a good probability that the database needs some attention. In this episode Lukas Fittl shares some hard-won wisdom about the causes and solution of many performance bottlenecks and the work that he is doing to shine some light on PostgreSQL to make it easier to understand how to keep it running smoothly.
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Surveying The Market Of Database Products
October 29th, 2023 | 47 mins 12 secs
Databases are the core of most applications, whether transactional or analytical. In recent years the selection of database products has exploded, making the critical decision of which engine(s) to use even more difficult. In this episode Tanya Bragin shares her experiences as a product manager for two major vendors and the lessons that she has learned about how teams should approach the process of tool selection.
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Defining A Strategy For Your Data Products
October 22nd, 2023 | 1 hr 3 mins
The primary application of data has moved beyond analytics. With the broader audience comes the need to present data in a more approachable format. This has led to the broad adoption of data products being the delivery mechanism for information. In this episode Ranjith Raghunath shares his thoughts on how to build a strategy for the development, delivery, and evolution of data products.
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Reducing The Barrier To Entry For Building Stream Processing Applications With Decodable
October 15th, 2023 | 1 hr 8 mins
Building streaming applications has gotten substantially easier over the past several years. Despite this, it is still operationally challenging to deploy and maintain your own stream processing infrastructure. Decodable was built with a mission of eliminating all of the painful aspects of developing and deploying stream processing systems for engineering teams. In this episode Eric Sammer discusses why more companies are including real-time capabilities in their products and the ways that Decodable makes it faster and easier.
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Using Data To Illuminate The Intentionally Opaque Insurance Industry
October 8th, 2023 | 51 mins 58 secs
The insurance industry is notoriously opaque and hard to navigate. Max Cho found that fact frustrating enough that he decided to build a business of making policy selection more navigable. In this episode he shares his journey of data collection and analysis and the challenges of automating an intentionally manual industry.
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Building ETL Pipelines With Generative AI
October 1st, 2023 | 51 mins 36 secs
Artificial intelligence applications require substantial high quality data, which is provided through ETL pipelines. Now that AI has reached the level of sophistication seen in the various generative models it is being used to build new ETL workflows. In this episode Jay Mishra shares his experiences and insights building ETL pipelines with the help of generative AI.
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Powering Vector Search With Real Time And Incremental Vector Indexes
September 24th, 2023 | 59 mins 16 secs
The rapid growth of machine learning, especially large language models, have led to a commensurate growth in the need to store and compare vectors. In this episode Louis Brandy discusses the applications for vector search capabilities both in and outside of AI, as well as the challenges of maintaining real-time indexes of vector data.
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Building Linked Data Products With JSON-LD
September 17th, 2023 | 1 hr 1 min
A significant amount of time in data engineering is dedicated to building connections and semantic meaning around pieces of information. Linked data technologies provide a means of tightly coupling metadata with raw information. In this episode Brian Platz explains how JSON-LD can be used as a shared representation of linked data for building semantic data products.
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An Overview Of The State Of Data Orchestration In An Increasingly Complex Data Ecosystem
September 10th, 2023 | 1 hr 1 min
Data systems are inherently complex and often require integration of multiple technologies. Orchestrators are centralized utilities that control the execution and sequencing of interdependent operations. This offers a single location for managing visibility and error handling so that data platform engineers can manage complexity. In this episode Nick Schrock, creator of Dagster, shares his perspective on the state of data orchestration technology and its application to help inform its implementation in your environment.
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Eliminate The Overhead In Your Data Integration With The Open Source dlt Library
September 3rd, 2023 | 42 mins 12 secs
Cloud data warehouses and the introduction of the ELT paradigm has led to the creation of multiple options for flexible data integration, with a roughly equal distribution of commercial and open source options. The challenge is that most of those options are complex to operate and exist in their own silo. The dlt project was created to eliminate overhead and bring data integration into your full control as a library component of your overall data system. In this episode Adrian Brudaru explains how it works, the benefits that it provides over other data integration solutions, and how you can start building pipelines today.