Summary The current trend in data management is to centralize the responsibilities of storing and curating the organization’s information to a data engineering team. This organizational pattern is reinforced by the architectural pattern of data lakes as a solution for managing storage and access. In this episode Zhamak Dehghani shares an alternative approach in the form of a data mesh. Rather than connecting all of your data flows to one destination, empower your individual business units to create data products that can be consumed by other teams. This was an interesting exploration of a different way to think about the relationship between how your data is produced, how it is used, and how to build a technical platform that supports the organizational needs of 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! And to grow your professional network and find opportunities with the startups that are changing the world then Angel List is the place to go. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/angel to sign up today. 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. Upcoming events include the O’Reilly AI Conference, the Strata Data Conference, and the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum. 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 Zhamak Dehghani about building a distributed data mesh for a domain oriented approach to data management

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by providing your definition of a "data lake" and discussing some of the problems and challenges that they pose?

What are some of the organizational and industry trends that tend to lead to this solution?

You have written a detailed post outlining the concept of a "data mesh" as an alternative to data lakes. Can you give a summary of what you mean by that phrase?

In a domain oriented data model, what are some useful methods for determining appropriate boundaries for the various data products?

What are some of the challenges that arise in this data mesh approach and how do they compare to those of a data lake? One of the primary complications of any data platform, whether distributed or monolithic, is that of discoverability. How do you approach that in a data mesh scenario?

A corollary to the issue of discovery is that of access

Summary Successful machine learning and artificial intelligence projects require large volumes of data that is properly labelled. The challenge is that most data is not clean and well annotated, requiring a scalable data labeling process. Ideally this process can be done using the tools and systems that already power your analytics, rather than sending data into a black box. In this episode Mark Sears, CEO of CloudFactory, explains how he and his team built a platform that provides valuable service to businesses and meaningful work to developing nations. He shares the lessons learned in the early years of growing the business, the strategies that have allowed them to scale and train their workforce, and the benefits of working within their customer’s existing platforms. He also shares some valuable insights into the current state of the art for machine learning in the real world.

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! Integrating data across the enterprise has been around for decades – so have the techniques to do it. But, a new way of integrating data and improving streams has evolved. By integrating each silo independently – data is able to integrate without any direct relation. At CluedIn they call it “eventual connectivity”. If you want to learn more on how to deliver fast access to your data across the enterprise leveraging this new method, and the technologies that make it possible, get a demo or presentation of the CluedIn Data Hub by visiting dataengineeringpodcast.com/cluedin. And don’t forget to thank them for supporting the show! 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. Coming up this fall is the combined events of Graphorum and the Data Architecture Summit. The agendas have been announced and super early bird registration for up to $300 off is available until July 26th, with early bird pricing for up to $200 off through August 30th. Use the code BNLLC to get an additional 10% off any pass when you register. 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 Mark Sears about Cloud Factory, masters of the art and science of labeling data for Machine Learning and more

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what CloudFactory is and the story behind it? What are some of the common requirements

Summary The market for data warehouse platforms is large and varied, with options for every use case. ClickHouse is an open source, column-oriented database engine built for interactive analytics with linear scalability. In this episode Robert Hodges and Alexander Zaitsev explain how it is architected to provide these features, the various unique capabilities that it provides, and how to run it in production. It was interesting to learn about some of the custom data types and performance optimizations that are included.

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! Integrating data across the enterprise has been around for decades – so have the techniques to do it. But, a new way of integrating data and improving streams has evolved. By integrating each silo independently – data is able to integrate without any direct relation. At CluedIn they call it “eventual connectivity”. If you want to learn more on how to deliver fast access to your data across the enterprise leveraging this new method, and the technologies that make it possible, get a demo or presentation of the CluedIn Data Hub by visiting dataengineeringpodcast.com/cluedin. And don’t forget to thank them for supporting the show! 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. Coming up this fall is the combined events of Graphorum and the Data Architecture Summit. The agendas have been announced and super early bird registration for up to $300 off is available until July 26th, with early bird pricing for up to $200 off through August 30th. Use the code BNLLC to get an additional 10% off any pass when you register. 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 Robert Hodges and Alexander Zaitsev about Clickhouse, an open source, column-oriented database for fast and scalable OLAP queries

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Clickhouse is and how you each got involved with it?

What are the primary use cases that Clickhouse is targeting? Where does it fit in the database market and how does it compare to other column stores, both open source and commercial?

Can you describe how Clickhouse is architected? Can you talk through the lifecycle of a given record or set of records from when they first get inserted into Clickhouse, through the engine an

Summary Anomaly detection is a capability that is useful in a variety of problem domains, including finance, internet of things, and systems monitoring. Scaling the volume of events that can be processed in real-time can be challenging, so Paul Brebner from Instaclustr set out to see how far he could push Kafka and Cassandra for this use case. In this interview he explains the system design that he tested, his findings for how these tools were able to work together, and how they behaved at different orders of scale. It was an interesting conversation about how he stress tested the Instaclustr managed service for benchmarking an application that has real-world utility.

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! Integrating data across the enterprise has been around for decades – so have the techniques to do it. But, a new way of integrating data and improving streams has evolved. By integrating each silo independently – data is able to integrate without any direct relation. At CluedIn they call it “eventual connectivity”. If you want to learn more on how to deliver fast access to your data across the enterprise leveraging this new method, and the technologies that make it possible, get a demo or presentation of the CluedIn Data Hub by visiting dataengineeringpodcast.com/cluedin. And don’t forget to thank them for supporting the show! 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. Coming up this fall is the combined events of Graphorum and the Data Architecture Summit. The agendas have been announced and super early bird registration for up to $300 off is available until July 26th, with early bird pricing for up to $200 off through August 30th. Use the code BNLLC to get an additional 10% off any pass when you register. 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 Paul Brebner about his experience designing and building a scalable, real-time anomaly detection system using Kafka and Cassandra

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing the problem that you were trying to solve and the requirements that you were aiming for?

What are some example cases where anomaly detection is useful or necessary?

Once you had established the requirements in terms of functionality and data volume, what was your approach for dete

Summary Building a data platform that works equally well for data engineering and data science is a task that requires familiarity with the needs of both roles. Data engineering platforms have a strong focus on stateful execution and tasks that are strictly ordered based on dependency graphs. Data science platforms provide an environment that is conducive to rapid experimentation and iteration, with data flowing directly between stages. Jeremiah Lowin has gained experience in both styles of working, leading him to be frustrated with all of the available tools. In this episode he explains his motivation for creating a new workflow engine that marries the needs of data engineers and data scientists, how it helps to smooth the handoffs between teams working on data projects, and how the design lets you focus on what you care about while it handles the failure cases for you. It is exciting to see a new generation of workflow engine that is learning from the benefits and failures of previous tools for processing your data pipelines.

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! 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. Coming up this fall is the combined events of Graphorum and the Data Architecture Summit. The agendas have been announced and super early bird registration for up to $300 off is available until July 26th, with early bird pricing for up to $200 off through August 30th. Use the code BNLLC to get an additional 10% off any pass when you register. 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 Jeremiah Lowin about Prefect, a workflow platform for data engineering

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Prefect is and your motivation for creating it? What are the axes along which a workflow engine can differentiate itself, and which of those have you focused on for Prefect? In some of your blog posts and your PyData presentation you discuss the concept of negative vs. positive engineering. Can you briefly outline what you mean by that and the ways that Prefect handles the negative cases for you? How is Prefect itself implemented and what tools or systems have you relied on most heavily for inspiration? How do you manage passing data between stages in a pipeline when they are running across distributed nodes? What was your decision making process when deciding to use Dask as your supported execution engine?

For tasks that require specific resources or dependencies how do you approach the idea of task affinity?

Does Prefect support managing tasks that bridge network boundaries? What are some of the features or capabilities of Prefect that are misunderstood or overlooked by users which you think should be exercised more often? What are the limitations of the open source core as compared to the cloud offering that you are building? What were your assumptions going into this project and how have they been challenged or updated as you dug deeper into the problem domain and received feedback from users? What are some of the most interesting/innovative/unexpected ways that you have seen Prefect used? When is Prefect the wrong choice? In your experience working on Airflow and Prefect, what are some of the common challenges and anti-patterns that arise in data engineering projects?

What are some best practices and industry trends that you are most excited by?

What do you have planned for the future of the Prefect project and company?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @jlowin on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

Prefect Airflow Dask

Podcast Episode

Prefect Blog PyData Presentation Tensorflow Workflow Engine

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary Building and maintaining a data lake is a choose your own adventure of tools, services, and evolving best practices. The flexibility and freedom that data lakes provide allows for generating significant value, but it can also lead to anti-patterns and inconsistent quality in your analytics. Delta Lake is an open source, opinionated framework built on top of Spark for interacting with and maintaining data lake platforms that incorporates the lessons learned at DataBricks from countless customer use cases. In this episode Michael Armbrust, the lead architect of Delta Lake, explains how the project is designed, how you can use it for building a maintainable data lake, and some useful patterns for progressively refining the data in your lake. This conversation was useful for getting a better idea of the challenges that exist in large scale data analytics, and the current state of the tradeoffs between data lakes and data warehouses in the cloud.

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! And to keep track of how your team is progressing on building new pipelines and tuning their workflows, you need a project management system designed by engineers, for engineers. Clubhouse lets you craft a workflow that fits your style, including per-team tasks, cross-project epics, a large suite of pre-built integrations, and a simple API for crafting your own. With such an intuitive tool it’s easy to make sure that everyone in the business is on the same page. Data Engineering Podcast listeners get 2 months free on any plan by going to dataengineeringpodcast.com/clubhouse today and signing up for a free trial. Support the show and get your data projects in order! 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. Coming up this fall is the combined events of Graphorum and the Data Architecture Summit. The agendas have been announced and super early bird registration for up to $300 off is available until July 26th, with early bird pricing for up to $200 off through August 30th. Use the code BNLLC to get an additional 10% off any pass when you register. 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 Michael Armbrust about Delta Lake, an open source storage layer that brings ACID transactions to Apache Spark and big data workloads.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data m

Summary Building a machine learning model can be difficult, but that is only half of the battle. Having a perfect model is only useful if you are able to get it into production. In this episode Stepan Pushkarev, founder of Hydrosphere, explains why deploying and maintaining machine learning projects in production is different from regular software projects and the challenges that they bring. He also describes the Hydrosphere platform, and how the different components work together to manage the full machine learning lifecycle of model deployment and retraining. This was a useful conversation to get a better understanding of the unique difficulties that exist for machine learning projects.

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! And to keep track of how your team is progressing on building new pipelines and tuning their workflows, you need a project management system designed by engineers, for engineers. Clubhouse lets you craft a workflow that fits your style, including per-team tasks, cross-project epics, a large suite of pre-built integrations, and a simple API for crafting your own. With such an intuitive tool it’s easy to make sure that everyone in the business is on the same page. Data Engineering Podcast listeners get 2 months free on any plan by going to dataengineeringpodcast.com/clubhouse today and signing up for a free trial. Support the show and get your data projects in order! 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. Coming up this fall is the combined events of Graphorum and the Data Architecture Summit. The agendas have been announced and super early bird registration for up to $300 off is available until July 26th, with early bird pricing for up to $200 off through August 30th. Use the code BNLLC to get an additional 10% off any pass when you register. 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 Stepan Pushkarev about Hydrosphere, the first open source platform for Data Science and Machine Learning Management automation

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Hydrosphere is and share its origin story? In your experience, what are the most challenging or complicated aspects of managing machine learning models in a production context?

How does it differ from deployment and maintenance

Summary Building an ETL pipeline can be a significant undertaking, and sometimes it needs to be rebuilt when a better option becomes available. In this episode Aaron Gibralter, director of engineering at Greenhouse, joins Raghu Murthy, founder and CEO of DataCoral, to discuss the journey that he and his team took from an in-house ETL pipeline built out of open source components onto a paid service. He explains how their original implementation was built, why they decided to migrate to a paid service, and how they made that transition. He also discusses how the abstractions provided by DataCoral allows his data scientists to remain productive without requiring dedicated data engineers. If you are either considering how to build a data pipeline or debating whether to migrate your existing ETL to a service this is definitely worth listening to for some perspective.

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! And to keep track of how your team is progressing on building new pipelines and tuning their workflows, you need a project management system designed by engineers, for engineers. Clubhouse lets you craft a workflow that fits your style, including per-team tasks, cross-project epics, a large suite of pre-built integrations, and a simple API for crafting your own. With such an intuitive tool it’s easy to make sure that everyone in the business is on the same page. Data Engineering Podcast listeners get 2 months free on any plan by going to dataengineeringpodcast.com/clubhouse today and signing up for a free trial. Support the show and get your data projects in order! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with the ways that Python is being used, including the latest in machine learning and data analysis. 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. Coming up this fall is the combined events of Graphorum and the Data Architecture Summit. The agendas have been announced and super early bird registration for up to $300 off is available until July 26th, with early bird pricing for up to $200 off through August 30th. Use the code BNLLC to get an additional 10% off any pass when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register. 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

Summary Some problems in data are well defined and benefit from a ready-made set of tools. For everything else, there’s Pachyderm, the platform for data science that is built to scale. In this episode Joe Doliner, CEO and co-founder, explains how Pachyderm started as an attempt to make data provenance easier to track, how the platform is architected and used today, and examples of how the underlying principles manifest in the workflows of data engineers and data scientists as they collaborate on data projects. In addition to all of that he also shares his thoughts on their recent round of fund-raising and where the future will take them. If you are looking for a set of tools for building your data science workflows then Pachyderm is a solid choice, featuring data versioning, first class tracking of data lineage, and language agnostic data pipelines.

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

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

Email @drebanin on Twitter drebanin on GitHub

Parting Question

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

Links

DBT Fishtown Analytics 8Tracks Internet Radio Redshift Magento Stitch Data Fivetran Airflow Business Intelligence Jinja template language BigQuery Snowflake Version Control Git Continuous Integration Test Driven Development Snowplow Analytics

Podcast Episode

dbt-utils We Can Do Better Than SQL blog post from EdgeDB EdgeDB Looker LookML

Podcast Interview

Presto DB

Podcast Interview

Spark SQL Hive Azure SQL Data Warehouse Data Warehouse Data Lake Data Council Conference Slowly Changing Dimensions dbt Archival Mode Analytics Periscope BI dbt docs dbt repository

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

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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 t

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 fri

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

@evan on Twitter LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Fauna Ruby on Rails CNET GitHub Twitter NoSQL Cassandra InnoDB Redis Memcached Timeseries Spanner Paper DynamoDB Paper Percolator ACID Calvin Protocol Daniel Abadi LINQ LSM Tree (Log-structured Merge-tree) Scala Change Data Capture GraphQL

Podcast.init Interview About Graphene

Fauna Query Language (FQL) CQL == Cassandra Query Language Object-Relational Databases LDAP == Lightweight Directory Access Protocol Auth0 OLAP == Online Analytical Processing Jepsen distributed systems safety research

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

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

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 approa

Summary Analytics projects fail all the time, resulting in lost opportunities and wasted resources. There are a number of factors that contribute to that failure and not all of them are under our control. However, many of them are and as data engineers we can help to keep our projects on the path to success. Eugene Khazin is the CEO of PrimeTSR where he is tasked with rescuing floundering analytics efforts and ensuring that they provide value to the business. In this episode he reflects on the ways that data projects can be structured to provide a higher probability of success and utility, how data engineers can get throughout the project lifecycle, and how to salvage a failed project so that some value can be gained from the effort.

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 Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Eugene Khazin about the leading causes for failure in analytics projects

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? The term "analytics" has grown to mean many different things to different people, so can you start by sharing your definition of what is in scope for an "analytics project" for the purposes of this discussion?

Wh

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 t

Summary Delivering a data analytics project on time and with accurate information is critical to the success of any business. DataOps is a set of practices to increase the probability of success by creating value early and often, and using feedback loops to keep your project on course. In this episode Chris Bergh, head chef of Data Kitchen, explains how DataOps differs from DevOps, how the industry has begun adopting DataOps, and how to adopt an agile approach to building your data platform.

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. "There aren’t enough data conferences out there that focus on the community, so that’s why these folks built a better one": Data Council is the premier community powered data platforms & engineering event for software engineers, data engineers, machine learning experts, deep learning researchers & artificial intelligence buffs who want to discover tools & insights to build new products. This year they will host over 50 speakers and 500 attendees (yeah that’s one of the best "Attendee:Speaker" ratios out there) in San Francisco on April 17-18th and are offering a $200 discount to listeners of the Data Engineering Podcast. Use code: DEP-200 at checkout 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 Chris Bergh about the current state of DataOps and why it’s more than just DevOps for data

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? We talked last year about what DataOps is, but can you give a quick overview of how the industry has changed or updated the definition since then?

It is easy to draw parallels between DataOps and DevOps, can you provide some clarity as to how they are different?

How has the conversat

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 over

Summary Deep learning is the latest class of technology that is gaining widespread interest. As data engineers we are responsible for building and managing the platforms that power these models. To help us understand what is involved, we are joined this week by Thomas Henson. In this episode he shares his experiences experimenting with deep learning, what data engineers need to know about the infrastructure and data requirements to power the models that your team is building, and how it can be used to supercharge our ETL pipelines.

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. 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, 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 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 platforms. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss the Strata conference in San Francisco on March 25th and the Artificial Intelligence conference in NYC on April 15th, both run by our friends at O’Reilly Media. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/stratacon and dataengineeringpodcast.com/aicon to register today and get 20% off Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Thomas Henson about what data engineers need to know about deep learning, including how to use it for their own projects

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of what deep learning is for anyone who isn’t familiar with it? What has been your personal experience with deep learning and what set you down that path? What is involved in building a data pipeline and production infrastructure for a deep learning product?

How does that differ from other types of analytics projects such as data warehousing or traditional ML?

For anyone who is in the early stages of a deep learning project, what are some of the edge cases or gotchas that they should be aware of? What are your opinions on the level of involvement/understanding that data engineers should have with the analytical products that are being built with the information we collect and curate? What are some ways that we can use deep learning as part of the data management process?

How does that shift the infrastructure requirements for our platforms?

Cloud providers have b

Summary Distributed storage systems are the foundational layer of any big data stack. There are a variety of implementations which support different specialized use cases and come with associated tradeoffs. Alluxio is a distributed virtual filesystem which integrates with multiple persistent storage systems to provide a scalable, in-memory storage layer for scaling computational workloads independent of the size of your data. In this episode Bin Fan explains how he got involved with the project, how it is implemented, and the use cases that it is particularly well suited for. If your storage and compute layers are too tightly coupled and you want to scale them independently then Alluxio is the tool for the job.

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 Bin Fan about Alluxio, a distributed virtual filesystem for unified access to disparate data sources

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Alluxio is and the history of the project?

What are some of the use cases that Alluxio enables?

How is Alluxio implemented and how has its architecture evolved over time?

What are some of the techniques that you use to mitigate the impact of latency, particularly when interfacing with storage systems across cloud providers and private data centers?

When dealing with large volumes of data over time it is often necessary to age out older records to cheaper storage. What capabilities does Alluxio provide for that lifecycle management? What are some of the most complex or challenging aspects of providing a unified abstraction across disparate storage platforms?

What are the tradeoffs that are made to provide a single API across systems with varying capabilities?

Testing and verification of distributed systems is a complex undertaking. Can you describe the approach that you use to ensure proper functionality of Alluxio as part of the development and release process?

In order to allow for this large scale testing with any regularity it must be straightforward to deploy and configure Alluxio. What are some of the mechanisms that you have built into the platform to simplify the operational aspects?

Can you describe a typical system topology that incorporates Alluxio? For someone planning a deployment of Alluxio, what should they be considering in terms of system requirements and deployment topologies?

What are some edge cases or operational complexities that they should be aware of?

What are some cases where Alluxio is the wrong choice?

What are some projects or products that provide a similar capability to Alluxio?

What do you have planned for the future of the Alluxio project and company?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @binfan on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

Alluxio

Project Company

Carnegie Me

Summary Machine learning is a class of technologies that promise to revolutionize business. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to identify and execute on ways that it can be used in large companies. Kevin Dewalt founded Prolego to help Fortune 500 companies build, launch, and maintain their first machine learning projects so that they can remain competitive in our landscape of constant change. In this episode he discusses why machine learning projects require a new set of capabilities, how to build a team from internal and external candidates, and how an example project progressed through each phase of maturity. This was a great conversation for anyone who wants to understand the benefits and tradeoffs of machine learning for their own projects and how to put it into practice.

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 Kevin Dewalt about his experiences at Prolego, building machine learning projects for Fortune 500 companies

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? For the benefit of software engineers and team leaders who are new to machine learning, can you briefly describe what machine learning is and why is it relevant to them? What is your primary mission at Prolego and how did you identify, execute on, and establish a presence in your particular market?

How much of your sales process is spent on educating your clients about what AI or ML are and the benefits that these technologies can provide?

What have you found to be the technical skills and capacity necessary for being successful in building and deploying a machine learning project?

When engaging with a client, what have you found to be the most common areas of technical capacity or knowledge that are needed?

Everyone talks about a talent shortage in machine learning. Can you suggest a recruiting or skills development process for companies which need to build out their data engineering practice? What challenges will teams typically encounter when creating an efficient working relationship between data scientists and data engineers? Can you briefly describe a successful project of developing a first ML model and putting it into production?

What is the breakdown of how much time was spent on different activities such as data wrangling, model development, and data engineering pipeline development? When releasing to production, can you share the types of metrics that you track to ensure the health and proper functioning of the models? What does a deployable artifact for a machine learning/deep learning application look like?

What basic technology stack is necessary for putting the first ML models into production?

How does the build vs. buy debate break down in this space and what products do you typically recommend to your clients?

What are the major risks associated with deploying ML models and how can a team mitigate them? Suppose a software engineer wants to break into ML. What data engineering skills would you suggest they learn? How should they position themselves for the right opportunity?

Contact Info

Email: Kevin Dewalt [email protected] and Russ Rands [email protected] Connect on LinkedIn: Kevin Dewalt and Russ Rands Twitter: @kevindewalt

Parting Question

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

Links

Prolego Download our book: Become an AI Company in 90 Days Google Rules Of ML AI Winter Machine Learning Supervised Learning O’Reilly Strata Conference GE Rebranding Commercials Jez Humble: Stop Hiring Devops Experts (And Start Growing Them) SQL ORM Django RoR Tensorflow PyTorch Keras Data Engineering Podcast Episode About Data Teams DevOps For Data Teams – DevOps Days Boston Presentation by Tobias Jupyter Notebook Data Engineering Podcast: Notebooks at Netflix Pandas

Podcast Interview

Joel Grus

JupyterCon Presentation Data Science From Scratch

Expensify Airflow

James Meickle Interview

Git Jenkins Continuous Integration Practical Deep Learning For Coders Course by Jeremy Howard Data Carpentry

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

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Summary Archaeologists collect and create a variety of data as part of their research and exploration. Open Context is a platform for cleaning, curating, and sharing this data. In this episode Eric Kansa describes how they process, clean, and normalize the data that they host, the challenges that they face with scaling ETL processes which require domain specific knowledge, and how the information contained in connections that they expose is being used for interesting projects.

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 Eric Kansa about Open Context, a platform for publishing, managing, and sharing research data

Interview

Introduction

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

I did some database and GIS work for my dissertation in archaeology, back in the late 1990’s. I got frustrated at the lack of comparative data, and I got frustrated at all the work I put into creating data that nobody would likely use. So I decided to focus my energies in research data management.

Can you start by describing what Open Context is and how it started?

Open Context is an open access data publishing service for archaeology. It started because we need better ways of dissminating structured data and digital media than is possible with conventional articles, books and reports.

What are your protocols for determining which data sets you will work with?

Datasets need to come from research projects that meet the normal standards of professional conduct (laws, ethics, professional norms) articulated by archaeology’s professional societies.

What are some of the challenges unique to research data?

What are some of the unique requirements for processing, publishing, and archiving research data?

You have to work on a shoe-string budget, essentially providing "public goods". Archaeologists typically don’t have much discretionary money available, and publishing and archiving data are not yet very common practices.

Another issues is that it will take a long time to publish enough data to power many "meta-analyses" that draw upon many datasets. The issue is that lots of archaeological data describes very particular places and times. Because datasets can be so particularistic, finding data relevant to your interests can be hard. So, we face a monumental task in supplying enough data to satisfy many, many paricularistic interests.

How much education is necessary around your content licensing for researchers who are interested in publishing their data with you?

We require use of Creative Commons licenses, and greatly encourage the CC-BY license or CC-Zero (public domain) to try to keep things simple and easy to understand.

Can you describe the system architecture that you use for Open Context?

Open Context is a Django Python application, with a Postgres database and an Apache Solr index. It’s running on Google cloud services on a Debian linux.

Wh

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

LinkedIn @justinm on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

StrongDM Authentication Vs. Authorization Hashicorp Vault Configuration Management Chef Puppet SaltStack Ansible Okta SSO (Single Sign On SOC 2 Two Factor Authentication SSH (Secure SHell) RDP

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

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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

Jesper

LinkedIn

Keld

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

LEGO Group ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Predictive Analytics Prescriptive Analytics Hadoop Center Of Excellence Continuous Integration Spark

Podcast Episode

Apache NiFi

Podcast Episode

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

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