Open Source | Data Engineering Podcast

Building A New Foundation For CouchDB - Episode 124

CouchDB is a distributed document database built for scale and ease of operation. With a built-in synchronization protocol and a HTTP interface it has become popular as a backend for web and mobile applications. Created 15 years ago, it has accrued some technical debt which is being addressed with a refactored architecture based on FoundationDB. In this episode Adam Kocoloski shares the history of the project, how it works under the hood, and how the new design will improve the project for our new era of computation. This was an interesting conversation about the challenges of maintaining a large and mission critical project and the work being done to evolve it.

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 fast.

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.

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. If you have ever struggled with implementing your own change data capture pipeline, or understanding when it would be useful then this episode is for you.

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 the outputs produced. In this episode Julien Le Dem and Willy Lulciuc explain how they built Marquez to serve that need, how it is architected, and how it compares to other options that you might be considering. Even if you already have a metadata repository this is worth a listen to learn more about the value that visibility of your data can bring to your organization.

Building A Real Time Event Data Warehouse For Sentry - Episode 108

November 26, 2019 tmacey

The team at Sentry has built a platform for anyone in the world to send software errors and events. As they scaled the volume of customers and data they began running into the limitations of their initial architecture. To address the needs of their business and continue to improve their capabilities they settled on Clickhouse as the new storage and query layer to power their business. In this episode James Cunningham and Ted Kaemming describe the process of rearchitecting a production system, what they learned in the process, and some useful tips for anyone else evaluating Clickhouse.

Ship Faster With An Opinionated Data Pipeline Framework - Episode 100

October 1, 2019 tmacey

Building an end-to-end pipeline for your machine learning projects is a complex task, made more difficult by the variety of ways that you can structure it. Kedro is a framework that provides an opinionated workflow that lets you focus on the parts that matter, so that you don’t waste time on gluing the steps together. In this episode Tom Goldenberg explains how it works, how it is being used at Quantum Black for customer projects, and how it can help you structure your own. Definitely worth a listen to gain more understanding of the benefits that a standardized process can provide.

Open Source Object Storage For All Of Your Data - Episode 99

September 23, 2019 tmacey

Object storage is quickly becoming the unifying layer for data intensive applications and analytics. Modern, cloud oriented data warehouses and data lakes both rely on the durability and ease of use that it provides. S3 from Amazon has quickly become the de-facto API for interacting with this service, so the team at MinIO have built a production grade, easy to manage storage engine that replicates that interface. In this episode Anand Babu Periasamy shares the origin story for the MinIO platform, the myriad use cases that it supports, and the challenges that they have faced in replicating the functionality of S3. He also explains the technical implementation, innovative design, and broad vision for the project.

Navigating Boundless Data Streams With The Swim Kernel - Episode 98

September 18, 2019 tmacey

The conventional approach to analytics involves collecting large amounts of data that can be cleaned, followed by a separate step for analysis and interpretation. Unfortunately this strategy is not viable for handling real-time, real-world use cases such as traffic management or supply chain logistics. In this episode Simon Crosby, CTO of Swim Inc., explains how the SwimOS kernel and the enterprise data fabric built on top of it enable brand new use cases for instant insights. This was an eye opening conversation about how stateful computation of data streams from edge devices can reduce cost and complexity as compared to batch oriented workflows.