Data Infrastructure | Data Engineering Podcast

Low Friction Data Governance With Immuta - Episode 164

Data governance is a term that encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, both technical and process oriented. One of the more complex aspects is that of access control to the data assets that an organization is responsible for managing. The team at Immuta has built a platform that aims to tackle that problem in a flexible and maintainable fashion so that data teams can easily integrate authorization, data masking, and privacy enhancing technologies into their data infrastructure. In this episode Steve Touw and Stephen Bailey share what they have built at Immuta, how it is implemented, and how it streamlines the workflow for everyone involved in working with sensitive data. If you are starting down the path of implementing a data governance strategy then this episode will provide a great overview of what is involved.

Self Service Data Management From Ingest To Insights With Isima - Episode 159

November 17, 2020 tmacey

The core mission of data engineers is to provide the business with a way to ask and answer questions of their data. This often takes the form of business intelligence dashboards, machine learning models, or APIs on top of a cleaned and curated data set. Despite the rapid progression of impressive tools and products built to fulfill this mission, it is still an uphill battle to tie everything together into a cohesive and reliable platform. At Isima they decided to reimagine the entire ecosystem from the ground up and built a single unified platform to allow end-to-end self service workflows from data ingestion through to analysis. In this episode CEO and co-founder of Isima Darshan Rawal explains how the biOS platform is architected to enable ease of use, the challenges that were involved in building an entirely new system from scratch, and how it can integrate with the rest of your data platform to allow for incremental adoption. This was an interesting and contrarian take on the current state of the data management industry and is worth a listen to gain some additional perspective.

Self Service Real Time Data Integration Without The Headaches With Meroxa - Episode 153

October 5, 2020 tmacey

Analytical workloads require a well engineered and well maintained data integration process to ensure that your information is reliable and up to date. Building a real-time pipeline for your data lakes and data warehouses is a non-trivial effort, requiring a substantial investment of time and energy. Meroxa is a new platform that aims to automate the heavy lifting of change data capture, monitoring, and data loading. In this episode founders DeVaris Brown and Ali Hamidi explain how their tenure at Heroku informed their approach to making data integration self service, how the platform is architected, and how they have designed their system to adapt to the continued evolution of the data ecosystem.

Simplify Your Data Architecture With The Presto Distributed SQL Engine - Episode 149

September 7, 2020 tmacey

Databases are limited in scope to the information that they directly contain. For analytical use cases you often want to combine data across multiple sources and storage locations. This frequently requires cumbersome and time-consuming data integration. To address this problem Martin Traverso and his colleagues at Facebook built the Presto distributed query engine. In this episode he explains how it is designed to allow for querying and combining data where it resides, the use cases that such an architecture unlocks, and the innovative ways that it is being employed at companies across the world. If you need to work with data in your cloud data lake, your on-premise database, or a collection of flat files, then give this episode a listen and then try out Presto today.

Exploring The TileDB Universal Data Engine - Episode 146

August 17, 2020 tmacey

Most databases are designed to work with textual data, with some special purpose engines that support domain specific formats. TileDB is a data engine that was built to support every type of data by using multi-dimensional arrays as the foundational primitive. In this episode the creator and founder of TileDB shares how he first started working on the underlying technology and the benefits of using a single engine for efficiently storing and querying any form of data. He also discusses the shifts in database architectures from vertically integrated monoliths to separately deployed layers, and the approach he is taking with TileDB cloud to embed the authorization into the storage engine, while providing a flexible interface for compute. This was a great conversation about a different approach to database architecture and how that enables a more flexible way to store and interact with data to power better data sharing and new opportunities for blending specialized domains.

Open Source Production Grade Data Integration With Meltano - Episode 141

July 13, 2020 tmacey

The first stage of every data pipeline is extracting the information from source systems. There are a number of platforms for managing data integration, but there is a notable lack of a robust and easy to use open source option. The Meltano project is aiming to provide a solution to that situation. In this episode, project lead Douwe Maan shares the history of how Meltano got started, the motivation for the recent shift in focus, and how it is implemented. The Singer ecosystem has laid the groundwork for a great option to empower teams of all sizes to unlock the value of their Data and Meltano is building the reamining structure to make it a fully featured contender for proprietary systems.

Easier Stream Processing On Kafka With ksqlDB - Episode 122

March 2, 2020 tmacey

Building applications on top of unbounded event streams is a complex endeavor, requiring careful integration of multiple disparate systems that were engineered in isolation. The ksqlDB project was created to address this state of affairs by building a unified layer on top of the Kafka ecosystem for stream processing. Developers can work with the SQL constructs that they are familiar with while automatically getting the durability and reliability that Kafka offers. In this episode Michael Drogalis, product manager for ksqlDB at Confluent, explains how the system is implemented, how you can use it for building your own stream processing applications, and how it fits into the lifecycle of your data infrastructure. If you have been struggling with building services on low level streaming interfaces then give this episode a listen and try it out for yourself.

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 you are daunted by the needs of your data infrastructure then it’s worth listening to how Josh and his team are approaching the problem.

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 and maintain data trusts, the technical and organizational challenges they face, and the outcomes that they have witnessed. If you are curious about data sharing strategies or data collaboratives, then listen now to learn more!

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 is architected, their motivations for being fully open source, and how they simplify the process of scaling your application from greenfield to global.