Open Source | Data Engineering Podcast

Open Source Reverse ETL For Everyone With Grouparoo - Episode 254

January 8, 2022 tmacey

Reverse ETL is a product category that evolved from the landscape of customer data platforms with a number of companies offering their own implementation of it. While struggling with the work of automating data integration workflows with marketing, sales, and support tools Brian Leonard accidentally discovered this need himself and turned it into the open source framework Grouparoo. In this episode he explains why he decided to turn these efforts into an open core business, how the platform is implemented, and the benefits of having an open source contender in the landscape of operational analytics products.

Creating Shared Context For Your Data Warehouse With A Controlled Vocabulary - Episode 252

January 2, 2022 tmacey

Communication and shared context are the hardest part of any data system. In recent years the focus has been on data catalogs as the means for documenting data assets, but those introduce a secondary system of record in order to find the necessary information. In this episode Emily Riederer shares her work to create a controlled vocabulary for managing the semantic elements of the data managed by her team and encoding it in the schema definitions in her data warehouse. She also explains how she created the dbtplyr package to simplify the work of creating and enforcing your own controlled vocabularies.

Fast And Flexible Headless Data Analytics With Cube.JS - Episode 248

December 21, 2021 tmacey

One of the perennial challenges of data analytics is having a consistent set of definitions, along with a flexible and performant API endpoint for querying them. In this episode Artom Keydunov and Pavel Tiunov share their work on Cube.js and the various ways that it is being used in the open source community.

Deliver Personal Experiences In Your Applications With The Unomi Open Source Customer Data Platform - Episode 245

December 12, 2021 tmacey

The core to providing your users with excellent service is to understand them and provide a personalized experience. Unfortunately many sites and applications take that to the extreme and collect too much information. In order to make it easier for developers to build customer profiles in a way that respects their privacy Serge Huber helped to create the Apache Unomi framework as an open source customer data platform. In this episode he explains how it can be used to build rich and useful profiles of your users, the system architecture that powers it, and some of the ways that it is being integrated into an organization’s broader data ecosystem.

Laying The Foundation Of Your Data Platform For The Era Of Big Complexity With Dagster - Episode 239

November 20, 2021 tmacey

The technology for scaling storage and processing of data has gone through massive evolution over the past decade, leaving us with the ability to work with massive datasets at the cost of massive complexity. Nick Schrock created the Dagster framework to help tame that complexity and scale the organizational capacity for working with data. In this episode he shares the journey that he and his team at Elementl have taken to understand the state of the ecosystem and how they can provide a foundational layer for a holistic data platform.

Eliminate Friction In Your Data Platform Through Unified Metadata Using OpenMetadata - Episode 237

November 10, 2021 tmacey

A significant source of friction and wasted effort in building and integrating data management systems is the fragmentation of metadata across various tools. After experiencing the impacts of fragmented metadata and previous attempts at building a solution Suresh Srinivas and Sriharsha Chintalapani created the OpenMetadata project. In this episode they share the lessons that they have learned through their previous attempts and the positive impact that a unified metadata layer had during their time at Uber. They also explain how the OpenMetadat project is aiming to be a common standard for defining and storing metadata for every use case in data platforms and the ways that they are architecting the reference implementation to simplify its adoption. This is an ambitious and exciting project, so listen and try it out today.

Data Exploration For Business Users Powered By Analytics Engineering With Lightdash - Episode 232

October 23, 2021 tmacey

The market for business intelligence has been going through an evolutionary shift in recent years. One of the driving forces for that change has been the rise of analytics engineering powered by dbt. Lightdash has fully embraced that shift by building an entire open source business intelligence framework that is powered by dbt models. In this episode Oliver Laslett describes why dashboards aren’t sufficient for business analytics, how Lightdash promotes the work that you are already doing in your data warehouse modeling with dbt, and how they are focusing on bridging the divide between data teams and business teams and the requirements that they have for data workflows.

Bringing The Power Of The DataHub Real-Time Metadata Graph To Everyone At Acryl Data - Episode 230

October 16, 2021 tmacey

The binding element of all data work is the metadata graph that is generated by all of the workflows that produce the assets used by teams across the organization. The DataHub project was created as a way to bring order to the scale of LinkedIn’s data needs. It was also designed to be able to work for small scale systems that are just starting to develop in complexity. In order to support the project and make it even easier to use for organizations of every size Shirshanka Das and Swaroop Jagadish founded Acryl Data. In this episode they discuss the recent work that has been done by the community, how their work is building on top of that foundation, and how you can get started with DataHub for your own work to manage data discovery today. They also share their ambitions for the near future of adding data observability and data quality management features.

Make Your Business Metrics Reusable With Open Source Headless BI Using Metriql - Episode 228

October 8, 2021 tmacey

The key to making data valuable to business users is the ability to calculate meaningful metrics and explore them along useful dimensions. Business intelligence tools have provided this capability for years, but they don’t offer a means of exposing those metrics to other systems. Metriql is an open source project that provides a headless BI system where you can define your metrics and share them with all of your other processes. In this episode Burak Kabakcı shares the story behind the project, how you can use it to create your metrics definitions, and the benefits of treating the semantic layer as a dedicated component of your platform.

Building Real-Time Data Platforms For Large Volumes Of Information With Aerospike - Episode 226

October 2, 2021 tmacey

Aerospike is a database engine that is designed to provide millisecond response times for queries across terabytes or petabytes. In this episode Chief Strategy Officer, Lenley Hensarling, explains how the ability to process these large volumes of information in real-time allows businesses to unlock entirely new capabilities. He also discusses the technical implementation that allows for such extreme performance and how the data model contributes to the scalability of the system. If you need to deal with massive data, at high velocities, in milliseconds, then Aerospike is definitely worth learning about.