Data Infrastructure

Build Your Data Analytics Like An Engineer - Episode 81

May 20, 2019

Summary

In recent years the traditional approach to building data warehouses has shifted from transforming records before loading, to transforming them afterwards. As a result, the tooling for those transformations needs to be reimagined. The data build tool (dbt) is designed to bring battle tested engineering practices to your analytics pipelines. By providing an opinionated set of best practices it simplifies collaboration and boosts confidence in your data teams. In this episode Drew Banin, creator of dbt, explains how it got started, how it is designed, and how you can start using it today to create reliable and well-tested reports in your favorite data warehouse.

Announcements

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
  • Understanding how your customers are using your product is critical for businesses of any size. To make it easier for startups to focus on delivering useful features Segment offers a flexible and reliable data infrastructure for your customer analytics and custom events. You only need to maintain one integration to instrument your code and get a future-proof way to send data to over 250 services with the flip of a switch. Not only does it free up your engineers’ time, it lets your business users decide what data they want where. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/segmentio today to sign up for their startup plan and get $25,000 in Segment credits and $1 million in free software from marketing and analytics companies like AWS, Google, and Intercom. On top of that you’ll get access to Analytics Academy for the educational resources you need to become an expert in data analytics for measuring product-market fit.
  • You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Drew Banin about DBT, the Data Build Tool, a toolkit for building analytics the way that developers build applications

Interview

  • Introduction
  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?
  • Can you start by explaining what DBT is and your motivation for creating it?
  • Where does it fit in the overall landscape of data tools and the lifecycle of data in an analytics pipeline?
  • Can you talk through the workflow for someone using DBT?
  • One of the useful features of DBT for stability of analytics is the ability to write and execute tests. Can you explain how those are implemented?
  • The packaging capabilities are beneficial for enabling collaboration. Can you talk through how the packaging system is implemented?
    • Are these packages driven by Fishtown Analytics or the dbt community?
  • What are the limitations of modeling everything as a SELECT statement?
  • Making SQL code reusable is notoriously difficult. How does the Jinja templating of DBT address this issue and what are the shortcomings?
    • What are your thoughts on higher level approaches to SQL that compile down to the specific statements?
  • Can you explain how DBT is implemented and how the design has evolved since you first began working on it?
  • What are some of the features of DBT that are often overlooked which you find particularly useful?
  • What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/innovative ways that you have seen DBT used?
  • What are the additional features that the commercial version of DBT provides?
  • What are some of the most useful or challenging lessons that you have learned in the process of building and maintaining DBT?
  • When is it the wrong choice?
  • What do you have planned for the future of DBT?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Using FoundationDB As The Bedrock For Your Distributed Systems - Episode 80

May 7, 2019

Summary

The database market continues to expand, offering systems that are suited to virtually every use case. But what happens if you need something customized to your application? FoundationDB is a distributed key-value store that provides the primitives that you need to build a custom database platform. In this episode Ryan Worl explains how it is architected, how to use it for your applications, and provides examples of system design patterns that can be built on top of it. If you need a foundation for your distributed systems, then FoundationDB is definitely worth a closer look.

Announcements

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
  • Alluxio is an open source, distributed data orchestration layer that makes it easier to scale your compute and your storage independently. By transparently pulling data from underlying silos, Alluxio unlocks the value of your data and allows for modern computation-intensive workloads to become truly elastic and flexible for the cloud. With Alluxio, companies like Barclays, JD.com, Tencent, and Two Sigma can manage data efficiently, accelerate business analytics, and ease the adoption of any cloud. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/alluxio today to learn more and thank them for their support.
  • Understanding how your customers are using your product is critical for businesses of any size. To make it easier for startups to focus on delivering useful features Segment offers a flexible and reliable data infrastructure for your customer analytics and custom events. You only need to maintain one integration to instrument your code and get a future-proof way to send data to over 250 services with the flip of a switch. Not only does it free up your engineers’ time, it lets your business users decide what data they want where. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/segmentio today to sign up for their startup plan and get $25,000 in Segment credits and $1 million in free software from marketing and analytics companies like AWS, Google, and Intercom. On top of that you’ll get access to Analytics Academy for the educational resources you need to become an expert in data analytics for measuring product-market fit.
  • You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ryan Worl about FoundationDB, a distributed key/value store that gives you the power of ACID transactions in a NoSQL database

Interview

  • Introduction
  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?
  • Can you explain what FoundationDB is and how you got involved with the project?
  • What are some of the unique use cases that FoundationDB enables?
  • Can you describe how FoundationDB is architected?
    • How is the ACID compliance implemented at the cluster level?
  • What are some of the mechanisms built into FoundationDB that contribute to its fault tolerance?
    • How are conflicts managed?
  • FoundationDB has an interesting feature in the form of Layers that provide different semantics on the underlying storage. Can you describe how that is implemented and some of the interesting layers that are available?
    • Is it possible to apply different layers, such as relational and document, to the same underlying objects in storage?
  • One of the aspects of FoundationDB that is called out in the documentation and which I have heard about elsewhere is the performance that it provides. Can you describe some of the implementation mechanics of FoundationDB that allow it to provide such high throughput?
  • For someone who wants to run FoundationDB can you describe a typical deployment topology?
    • What are the scaling factors for the underlying storage and for the Layers that are operating on the cluster?
  • Once you have a cluster deployed, what are some of the edge cases that users should watch out for?
    • How are version upgrades managed in a cluster?
  • What are some of the ways that FoundationDB impacts the way that an application developer or data engineer would architect their software as compared to working with something like Postgres or MongoDB?
  • What are some of the more interesting/unusual/unexpected ways that you have seen FoundationDB used?
  • When is FoundationDB the wrong choice?
  • What is in store for the future of FoundationDB?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Running Your Database On Kubernetes With KubeDB - Episode 79

April 29, 2019

Summary

Kubernetes is a driving force in the renaissance around deploying and running applications. However, managing the database layer is still a separate concern. The KubeDB project was created as a way of providing a simple mechanism for running your storage system in the same platform as your application. In this episode Tamal Saha explains how the KubeDB project got started, why you might want to run your database with Kubernetes, and how to get started. He also covers some of the challenges of managing stateful services in Kubernetes and how the fast pace of the community has contributed to the evolution of KubeDB. If you are at any stage of a Kubernetes implementation, or just thinking about it, this is definitely worth a listen to get some perspective on how to leverage it for your entire application stack.

Announcements

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
  • Alluxio is an open source, distributed data orchestration layer that makes it easier to scale your compute and your storage independently. By transparently pulling data from underlying silos, Alluxio unlocks the value of your data and allows for modern computation-intensive workloads to become truly elastic and flexible for the cloud. With Alluxio, companies like Barclays, JD.com, Tencent, and Two Sigma can manage data efficiently, accelerate business analytics, and ease the adoption of any cloud. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/alluxio today to learn more and thank them for their support.
  • Understanding how your customers are using your product is critical for businesses of any size. To make it easier for startups to focus on delivering useful features Segment offers a flexible and reliable data infrastructure for your customer analytics and custom events. You only need to maintain one integration to instrument your code and get a future-proof way to send data to over 250 services with the flip of a switch. Not only does it free up your engineers’ time, it lets your business users decide what data they want where. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/segmentio today to sign up for their startup plan and get $25,000 in Segment credits and $1 million in free software from marketing and analytics companies like AWS, Google, and Intercom. On top of that you’ll get access to Analytics Academy for the educational resources you need to become an expert in data analytics for measuring product-market fit.
  • You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tamal Saha about KubeDB, a project focused on making running production-grade databases easy on Kubernetes

Interview

  • Introduction
  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?
  • Can you start by explaining what KubeDB is and how the project got started?
  • What are the main challenges associated with running a stateful system on top of Kubernetes?
    • Why would someone want to run their database on a container platform rather than on a dedicated instance or with a hosted service?
  • Can you describe how KubeDB is implemented and how that has evolved since you first started working on it?
  • Can you talk through how KubeDB simplifies the process of deploying and maintaining databases?
  • What is involved in adding support for a new database?
    • How do the requirements change for systems that are natively clustered?
  • How does KubeDB help with maintenance processes around upgrading existing databases to newer versions?
  • How does the work that you are doing on KubeDB compare to what is available in StorageOS?
    • Are there any other projects that are targeting similar goals?
  • What have you found to be the most interesting/challenging/unexpected aspects of building KubeDB?
  • What do you have planned for the future of the project?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Unpacking Fauna: A Global Scale Cloud Native Database - Episode 78

April 22, 2019

Summary

One of the biggest challenges for any business trying to grow and reach customers globally is how to scale their data storage. FaunaDB is a cloud native database built by the engineers behind Twitter’s infrastructure and designed to serve the needs of modern systems. Evan Weaver is the co-founder and CEO of Fauna and in this episode he explains the unique capabilities of Fauna, compares the consensus and transaction algorithm to that used in other NewSQL systems, and describes the ways that it allows for new application design patterns. One of the unique aspects of Fauna that is worth drawing attention to is the first class support for temporality that simplifies querying of historical states of the data. It is definitely worth a good look for anyone building a platform that needs a simple to manage data layer that will scale with your business.

Announcements

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
  • Alluxio is an open source, distributed data orchestration layer that makes it easier to scale your compute and your storage independently. By transparently pulling data from underlying silos, Alluxio unlocks the value of your data and allows for modern computation-intensive workloads to become truly elastic and flexible for the cloud. With Alluxio, companies like Barclays, JD.com, Tencent, and Two Sigma can manage data efficiently, accelerate business analytics, and ease the adoption of any cloud. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/alluxio today to learn more and thank them for their support.
  • Understanding how your customers are using your product is critical for businesses of any size. To make it easier for startups to focus on delivering useful features Segment offers a flexible and reliable data infrastructure for your customer analytics and custom events. You only need to maintain one integration to instrument your code and get a future-proof way to send data to over 250 services with the flip of a switch. Not only does it free up your engineers’ time, it lets your business users decide what data they want where. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/segmentio today to sign up for their startup plan and get $25,000 in Segment credits and $1 million in free software from marketing and analytics companies like AWS, Google, and Intercom. On top of that you’ll get access to Analytics Academy for the educational resources you need to become an expert in data analytics for measuring product-market fit.
  • You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Evan Weaver about FaunaDB, a modern operational data platform built for your cloud

Interview

  • Introduction
  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?
  • Can you start by explaining what FaunaDB is and how it got started?
  • What are some of the main use cases that FaunaDB is targeting?
    • How does it compare to some of the other global scale databases that have been built in recent years such as CockroachDB?
  • Can you describe the architecture of FaunaDB and how it has evolved?
  • The consensus and replication protocol in Fauna is intriguing. Can you talk through how it works?
    • What are some of the edge cases that users should be aware of?
    • How are conflicts managed in Fauna?
  • What is the underlying storage layer?
    • How is the query layer designed to allow for different query patterns and model representations?
  • How does data modeling in Fauna compare to that of relational or document databases?
    • Can you describe the query format?
    • What are some of the common difficulties or points of confusion around interacting with data in Fauna?
  • What are some application design patterns that are enabled by using Fauna as the storage layer?
  • Given the ability to replicate globally, how do you mitigate latency when interacting with the database?
  • What are some of the most interesting or unexpected ways that you have seen Fauna used?
  • When is it the wrong choice?
  • What have been some of the most interesting/unexpected/challenging aspects of building the Fauna database and company?
  • What do you have in store for the future of Fauna?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Index Your Big Data With Pilosa For Faster Analytics - Episode 77

April 15, 2019

Summary

Database indexes are critical to ensure fast lookups of your data, but they are inherently tied to the database engine. Pilosa is rewriting that equation by providing a flexible, scalable, performant engine for building an index of your data to enable high-speed aggregate analysis. In this episode Seebs explains how Pilosa fits in the broader data landscape, how it is architected, and how you can start using it for your own analysis. This was an interesting exploration of a different way to look at what a database can be.

Announcements

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
  • Alluxio is an open source, distributed data orchestration layer that makes it easier to scale your compute and your storage independently. By transparently pulling data from underlying silos, Alluxio unlocks the value of your data and allows for modern computation-intensive workloads to become truly elastic and flexible for the cloud. With Alluxio, companies like Barclays, JD.com, Tencent, and Two Sigma can manage data efficiently, accelerate business analytics, and ease the adoption of any cloud. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/alluxio today to learn more and thank them for their support.
  • Understanding how your customers are using your product is critical for businesses of any size. To make it easier for startups to focus on delivering useful features Segment offers a flexible and reliable data infrastructure for your customer analytics and custom events. You only need to maintain one integration to instrument your code and get a future-proof way to send data to over 250 services with the flip of a switch. Not only does it free up your engineers’ time, it lets your business users decide what data they want where. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/segmentio today to sign up for their startup plan and get $25,000 in Segment credits and $1 million in free software from marketing and analytics companies like AWS, Google, and Intercom. On top of that you’ll get access to Analytics Academy for the educational resources you need to become an expert in data analytics for measuring product-market fit.
  • You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Seebs about Pilosa, an open source, distributed bitmap index

Interview

  • Introduction
  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?
  • Can you start by describing what Pilosa is and how the project got started?
  • Where does Pilosa fit into the overall data ecosystem and how does it integrate into an existing stack?
  • What types of use cases is Pilosa uniquely well suited for?
  • The Pilosa data model is fairly unique. Can you talk through how it is represented and implemented?
  • What are some approaches to modeling data that might be coming from a relational database or some structured flat files?
    • How do you handle highly dimensional data?
  • What are some of the decisions that need to be made early in the modeling process which could have ramifications later on in the lifecycle of the project?
  • What are the scaling factors of Pilosa?
  • What are some of the most interesting/challenging/unexpected lessons that you have learned in the process of building Pilosa?
  • What is in store for the future of Pilosa?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Serverless Data Pipelines On DataCoral - Episode 76

April 8, 2019

Summary

How much time do you spend maintaining your data pipeline? How much end user value does that provide? Raghu Murthy founded DataCoral as a way to abstract the low level details of ETL so that you can focus on the actual problem that you are trying to solve. In this episode he explains his motivation for building the DataCoral platform, how it is leveraging serverless computing, the challenges of delivering software as a service to customer environments, and the architecture that he has designed to make batch data management easier to work with. This was a fascinating conversation with someone who has spent his entire career working on simplifying complex data problems.

Announcements

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
  • Managing and auditing access to your servers and databases is a problem that grows in difficulty alongside the growth of your teams. If you are tired of wasting your time cobbling together scripts and workarounds to give your developers, data scientists, and managers the permissions that they need then it’s time to talk to our friends at strongDM. They have built an easy to use platform that lets you leverage your company’s single sign on for your data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/strongdm today to find out how you can simplify your systems.
  • Alluxio is an open source, distributed data orchestration layer that makes it easier to scale your compute and your storage independently. By transparently pulling data from underlying silos, Alluxio unlocks the value of your data and allows for modern computation-intensive workloads to become truly elastic and flexible for the cloud. With Alluxio, companies like Barclays, JD.com, Tencent, and Two Sigma can manage data efficiently, accelerate business analytics, and ease the adoption of any cloud. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/alluxio today to learn more and thank them for their support.
  • You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Raghu Murthy about DataCoral, a platform that offers a fully managed and secure stack in your own cloud that delivers data to where you need it

Interview

  • Introduction
  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?
  • Can you start by explaining what DataCoral is and your motivation for founding it?
  • How does the data-centric approach of DataCoral differ from the way that other platforms think about processing information?
  • Can you describe how the DataCoral platform is designed and implemented, and how it has evolved since you first began working on it?
    • How does the concept of a data slice play into the overall architecture of your platform?
    • How do you manage transformations of data schemas and formats as they traverse different slices in your platform?
  • On your site it mentions that you have the ability to automatically adjust to changes in external APIs, can you discuss how that manifests?
  • What has been your experience, both positive and negative, in building on top of serverless components?
  • Can you discuss the customer experience of onboarding onto Datacoral and how it differs between existing data platforms and greenfield projects?
  • What are some of the slices that have proven to be the most challenging to implement?
    • Are there any that you are currently building that you are most excited for?
  • How much effort do you anticipate if and/or when you begin to support other cloud providers?
  • When is Datacoral the wrong choice?
  • What do you have planned for the future of Datacoral, both from a technical and business perspective?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Building An Enterprise Data Fabric At CluedIn - Episode 74

March 25, 2019

Summary

Data integration is one of the most challenging aspects of any data platform, especially as the variety of data sources and formats grow. Enterprise organizations feel this acutely due to the silos that occur naturally across business units. The CluedIn team experienced this issue first-hand in their previous roles, leading them to build a business aimed at building a managed data fabric for the enterprise. In this episode Tim Ward, CEO of CluedIn, joins me to explain how their platform is architected, how they manage the task of integrating with third-party platforms, automating entity extraction and master data management, and the work of providing multiple views of the same data for different use cases. I highly recommend listening closely to his explanation of how they manage consistency of the data that they process across different storage backends.

Announcements

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
  • Managing and auditing access to your servers and databases is a problem that grows in difficulty alongside the growth of your teams. If you are tired of wasting your time cobbling together scripts and workarounds to give your developers, data scientists, and managers the permissions that they need then it’s time to talk to our friends at strongDM. They have built an easy to use platform that lets you leverage your company’s single sign on for your data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/strongdm today to find out how you can simplify your systems.
  • Alluxio is an open source, distributed data orchestration layer that makes it easier to scale your compute and your storage independently. By transparently pulling data from underlying silos, Alluxio unlocks the value of your data and allows for modern computation-intensive workloads to become truly elastic and flexible for the cloud. With Alluxio, companies like Barclays, JD.com, Tencent, and Two Sigma can manage data efficiently, accelerate business analytics, and ease the adoption of any cloud. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/alluxio today to learn more and thank them for their support.
  • You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tim Ward about CluedIn, an integration platform for implementing your companies data fabric

Interview

  • Introduction

  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?

  • Before we get started, can you share your definition of what a data fabric is?

  • Can you explain what CluedIn is and share the story of how it started?

    • Can you describe your ideal customer?
    • What are some of the primary ways that organizations are using CluedIn?

  • Can you give an overview of the system architecture that you have built and how it has evolved since you first began building it?

  • For a new customer of CluedIn, what is involved in the onboarding process?

  • What are some of the most challenging aspects of data integration?

    • What is your approach to managing the process of cleaning the data that you are ingesting?
      • How much domain knowledge from a business or industry perspective do you incorporate during onboarding and ongoing execution?
    • How do you preserve and expose data lineage/provenance to your customers?

  • How do you manage changes or breakage in the interfaces that you use for source or destination systems?

  • What are some of the signals that you monitor to ensure the continued healthy operation of your platform?

  • What are some of the most notable customer success stories that you have experienced?

    • Are there any notable failures that you have experienced, and if so, what were the lessons learned?

  • What are some cases where CluedIn is not the right choice?

  • What do you have planned for the future of CluedIn?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Customer Analytics At Scale With Segment - Episode 72

March 4, 2019

Summary

Customer analytics is a problem domain that has given rise to its own industry. In order to gain a full understanding of what your users are doing and how best to serve them you may need to send data to multiple services, each with their own tracking code or APIs. To simplify this process and allow your non-engineering employees to gain access to the information they need to do their jobs Segment provides a single interface for capturing data and routing it to all of the places that you need it. In this interview Segment CTO and co-founder Calvin French-Owen explains how the company got started, how it manages to multiplex data streams from multiple sources to multiple destinations, and how it can simplify your work of gaining visibility into how your customers are engaging with your business.

Announcements

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
  • Managing and auditing access to your servers and databases is a problem that grows in difficulty alongside the growth of your teams. If you are tired of wasting your time cobbling together scripts and workarounds to give your developers, data scientists, and managers the permissions that they need then it’s time to talk to our friends at strongDM. They have built an easy to use platform that lets you leverage your company’s single sign on for your data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/strongdm today to find out how you can simplify your systems.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
  • You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with O’Reilly Media for the Strata conference in San Francisco on March 25th and the Artificial Intelligence conference in NYC on April 15th. Here in Boston, starting on May 17th, you still have time to grab a ticket to the Enterprise Data World, and from April 30th to May 3rd is the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register.
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Calvin French-Owen about the data platform that Segment has built to handle multiplexing continuous streams of data from multiple sources to multiple destinations

Interview

  • Introduction
  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?
  • Can you start by explaining what Segment is and how the business got started?
    • What are some of the primary ways that your customers are using the Segment platform?
    • How have the capabilities and use cases of the Segment platform changed since it was first launched?
  • Layered on top of the data integration platform you have added the concepts of Protocols and Personas. Can you explain how each of those products fit into the overall structure of Segment and the driving force behind their design and use?
  • What are some of the best practices for structuring custom events in a way that they can be easily integrated with downstream platforms?
    • How do you manage changes or errors in the events generated by the various sources that you support?
  • How is the Segment platform architected and how has that architecture evolved over the past few years?
  • What are some of the unique challenges that you face as a result of being a many-to-many event routing platform?
  • In addition to the various services that you integrate with for data delivery, you also support populating of data warehouses. What is involved in establishing and maintaining the schema and transformations for a customer?
  • What have been some of the most interesting, unexpected, and/or challenging lessons that you have learned while building and growing the technical and business aspects of Segment?
  • What are some of the features and improvements, both technical and business, that you have planned for the future?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Managing Database Access Control For Teams With strongDM - Episode 67

January 29, 2019

Summary

Controlling access to a database is a solved problem… right? It can be straightforward for small teams and a small number of storage engines, but once either or both of those start to scale then things quickly become complex and difficult to manage. After years of running across the same issues in numerous companies and even more projects Justin McCarthy built strongDM to solve database access management for everyone. In this episode he explains how the strongDM proxy works to grant and audit access to storage systems and the benefits that it provides to engineers and team leads.

Introduction

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Justin McCarthy about StrongDM, a hosted service that simplifies access controls for your data

Interview

  • Introduction
  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?
  • Can you start by explaining the problem that StrongDM is solving and how the company got started?
    • What are some of the most common challenges around managing access and authentication for data storage systems?
    • What are some of the most interesting workarounds that you have seen?
    • Which areas of authentication, authorization, and auditing are most commonly overlooked or misunderstood?
  • Can you describe the architecture of your system?
    • What strategies have you used to enable interfacing with such a wide variety of storage systems?
  • What additional capabilities do you provide beyond what is natively available in the underlying systems?
  • What are some of the most difficult aspects of managing varying levels of permission for different roles across the diversity of platforms that you support, given that they each have different capabilities natively?
  • For a customer who is onboarding, what is involved in setting up your platform to integrate with their systems?
  • What are some of the assumptions that you made about your problem domain and market when you first started which have been disproven?
  • How do organizations in different industries react to your product and how do their policies around granting access to data differ?
  • What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/challenging lessons that you have learned in the process of building and growing StrongDM?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Building Enterprise Big Data Systems At LEGO - Episode 66

January 21, 2019

Summary

Building internal expertise around big data in a large organization is a major competitive advantage. However, it can be a difficult process due to compliance needs and the need to scale globally on day one. In this episode Jesper Søgaard and Keld Antonsen share the story of starting and growing the big data group at LEGO. They discuss the challenges of being at global scale from the start, hiring and training talented engineers, prototyping and deploying new systems in the cloud, and what they have learned in the process. This is a useful conversation for engineers, managers, and leadership who are interested in building enterprise big data systems.

Preamble

  • Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
  • When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
  • Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
  • To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
  • Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
  • Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Keld Antonsen and Jesper Soegaard about the data infrastructure and analytics that powers LEGO

Interview

  • Introduction
  • How did you get involved in the area of data management?
  • My understanding is that the big data group at LEGO is a fairly recent development. Can you share the story of how it got started?
    • What kinds of data practices were in place prior to starting a dedicated group for managing the organization’s data?
    • What was the transition process like, migrating data silos into a uniformly managed platform?
  • What are the biggest data challenges that you face at LEGO?
  • What are some of the most critical sources and types of data that you are managing?
  • What are the main components of the data infrastructure that you have built to support the organizations analytical needs?
    • What are some of the technologies that you have found to be most useful?
    • Which have been the most problematic?
  • What does the team structure look like for the data services at LEGO?
    • Does that reflect in the types/numbers of systems that you support?
  • What types of testing, monitoring, and metrics do you use to ensure the health of the systems you support?
  • What have been some of the most interesting, challenging, or useful lessons that you have learned while building and maintaining the data platforms at LEGO?
  • How have the data systems at Lego evolved over recent years as new technologies and techniques have been developed?
  • How does the global nature of the LEGO business influence the design strategies and technology choices for your platform?
  • What are you most excited for in the coming year?

Contact Info

Parting Question

  • From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA