Summary

Architectural decisions are all based on certain constraints and a desire to optimize for different outcomes. In data systems one of the core architectural exercises is data modeling, which can have significant impacts on what is and is not possible for downstream use cases. By incorporating column-level lineage in the data modeling process it encourages a more robust and well-informed design. In this episode Satish Jayanthi explores the benefits of incorporating column-aware tooling in the data modeling process.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack- Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Satish Jayanthi about the practice and promise of building a column-aware data architecture through intentional modeling

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? How has the move to the cloud for data warehousing/data platforms influenced the practice of data modeling?

There are ongoing conversations about the continued merits of dimensional modeling techniques in modern warehouses. What are the modeling practices that you have found to be most useful in large and complex data environments?

Can you describe what you mean by the term column-aware in the context of data modeling/data architecture?

What are the capabilities that need to be built into a tool for it to be effectively column-aware?

What are some of the ways that tools like dbt miss the mark in managing large/complex transformation workloads? Column-awareness is obviously critical in the context of the warehouse. What are some of the ways that that information can be fed into other contexts? (e.g. ML, reverse ETL, etc.) What is the importance of embedding column-level lineage awareness into transformation tool vs. layering on top w/ dedicated lineage/metadata tooling? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen column-aware data modeling used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on building column-aware tooling? When is column-aware modeling the wrong choice? What are some additional resources that you recommend for individuals/teams who want to learn more about data modeling/column aware principles?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Coalesce

Podcast Episode

Star Schema Conformed Dimensions Data Vault

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

RudderStack provides all your customer data pipeli

Summary

The customer data platform is a category of services that was developed early in the evolution of the current era of cloud services for data processing. When it was difficult to wire together the event collection, data modeling, reporting, and activation it made sense to buy monolithic products that handled every stage of the customer data lifecycle. Now that the data warehouse has taken center stage a new approach of composable customer data platforms is emerging. In this episode Darren Haken is joined by Tejas Manohar to discuss how Autotrader UK is addressing their customer data needs by building on top of their existing data stack.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Darren Haken and Tejas Manohar about building a composable CDP and how you can start adopting it incrementally

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what you mean by a "composable CDP"?

What are some of the key ways that it differs from the ways that we think of a CDP today?

What are the problems that you were focused on addressing at Autotrader that are solved by a CDP? One of the promises of the first generation CDP was an opinionated way to model your data so that non-technical teams could own this responsibility. What do you see as the risks/tradeoffs of moving CDP functionality into the same data stack as the rest of the organization?

What about companies that don't have the capacity to run a full data infrastructure?

Beyond the core technology of the data warehouse, what are the other evolutions/innovations that allow for a CDP experience to be built on top of the core data stack? added burden on core data teams to generate event-driven data models When iterating toward a CDP on top of the core investment of the infrastructure to feed and manage a data warehouse, what are the typical first steps?

What are some of the components in the ecosystem that help to speed up the time to adoption? (e.g. pre-built dbt packages for common transformations, etc.)

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen CDPs implemented? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on CDP related functionality? When is a CDP (composable or monolithic) the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of the CDP stack?

Contact Info

Darren

LinkedIn @DarrenHaken on Twitter

Tejas

LinkedIn @tejasmanohar on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Autotrader Hightouch

Customer Studio

CDP == Customer Data Platform Segment

Podcast Episode

mPar

Summary

The data ecosystem has been building momentum for several years now. As a venture capital investor Matt Turck has been trying to keep track of the main trends and has compiled his findings into the MAD (ML, AI, and Data) landscape reports each year. In this episode he shares his experiences building those reports and the perspective he has gained from the exercise.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Businesses that adapt well to change grow 3 times faster than the industry average. As your business adapts, so should your data. RudderStack Transformations lets you customize your event data in real-time with your own JavaScript or Python code. Join The RudderStack Transformation Challenge today for a chance to win a $1,000 cash prize just by submitting a Transformation to the open-source RudderStack Transformation library. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack today to learn more Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Matt Turck about his annual report on the Machine Learning, AI, & Data landscape and the insights around data infrastructure that he has gained in the process

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what the MAD landscape report is and the story behind it?

At a high level, what is your goal in the compilation and maintenance of your landscape document? What are your guidelines for what to include in the landscape?

As the data landscape matures, how have you seen that influence the types of projects/companies that are founded?

What are the product categories that were only viable when capital was plentiful and easy to obtain? What are the product categories that you think will be swallowed by adjacent concerns, and which are likely to consolidate to remain competitive?

The rapid growth and proliferation of data tools helped establish the "Modern Data Stack" as a de-facto architectural paradigm. As we move into this phase of contraction, what are your predictions for how the "Modern Data Stack" will evolve?

Is there a different architectural paradigm that you see as growing to take its place?

How has your presentation and the types of information that you collate in the MAD landscape evolved since you first started it?~~ What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected product and positioning approaches that you have seen while tracking data infrastructure as a VC and maintainer of the MAD landscape? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on the MAD landscape over the years? What do you have planned for future iterations of the MAD landscape?

Contact Info

Website @mattturck on Twitter MAD Landscape Comments Email

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

MAD Landscape First Mark Capital Bayesian Learning AI Winter Databricks Cloud Native Landscape LUMA Scape Hadoop Ecosystem Modern Data Stack Reverse ETL Generative AI dbt Transform

Podcast Episode

Snowflake IPO Dataiku Iceberg

Podcast Episode

Hudi

Podcast Episode

DuckDB

Podcast Episode

Trino Y42

Podcast Episode

Mozart Data

Podcast Episode

Keboola MPP Database

The intro and outro music is f

Summary

Cloud data warehouses have unlocked a massive amount of innovation and investment in data applications, but they are still inherently limiting. Because of their complete ownership of your data they constrain the possibilities of what data you can store and how it can be used. Projects like Apache Iceberg provide a viable alternative in the form of data lakehouses that provide the scalability and flexibility of data lakes, combined with the ease of use and performance of data warehouses. Ryan Blue helped create the Iceberg project, and in this episode he rejoins the show to discuss how it has evolved and what he is doing in his new business Tabular to make it even easier to implement and maintain.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Hey there podcast listener, are you tired of dealing with the headache that is the 'Modern Data Stack'? We feel your pain. It's supposed to make building smarter, faster, and more flexible data infrastructures a breeze. It ends up being anything but that. Setting it up, integrating it, maintaining it—it’s all kind of a nightmare. And let's not even get started on all the extra tools you have to buy to get it to do its thing. But don't worry, there is a better way. TimeXtender takes a holistic approach to data integration that focuses on agility rather than fragmentation. By bringing all the layers of the data stack together, TimeXtender helps you build data solutions up to 10 times faster and saves you 70-80% on costs. If you're fed up with the 'Modern Data Stack', give TimeXtender a try. Head over to timextender.com/dataengineering where you can do two things: watch us build a data estate in 15 minutes and start for free today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Ryan Blue about the evolution and applications of the Iceberg table format and how he is making it more accessible at Tabular

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Iceberg is and its position in the data lake/lakehouse ecosystem?

Since it is a fundamentally a specification, how do you manage compatibility and consistency across implementations?

What are the notable changes in the Iceberg project and its role in the ecosystem since our last conversation October of 2018? Around the time that Iceberg was first created at Netflix a number of alternative table formats were also being developed. What are the characteristics of Iceberg that lead teams to adopt it for their lakehouse projects?

Given the constant evolution of the various table formats it can be difficult to determine an up-to-date comparison of their features, particularly earlier in their development. What are the aspects of this problem space that make it so challenging to establish unbiased and comprehensive comparisons?

For someone who wants to manage their data in Iceberg tables, what does the implementation look like?

How does that change based on the type of query/processing engine being used?

Once a table has been created, what are the capabilities of Iceberg that help to support ongoing use and maintenance? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Iceberg used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Iceberg/Tabular? When is Iceberg/Tabular the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Iceberg/Tabular?

Contact Info

LinkedIn rdblue on GitHub

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the

Summary

Data is a team sport, but it's often difficult for everyone on the team to participate. For a long time the mantra of data tools has been "by developers, for developers", which automatically excludes a large portion of the business members who play a crucial role in the success of any data project. Quilt Data was created as an answer to make it easier for everyone to contribute to the data being used by an organization and collaborate on its application. In this episode Aneesh Karve shares the journey that Quilt has taken to provide an approachable interface for working with versioned data in S3 that empowers everyone to collaborate.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Truly leveraging and benefiting from streaming data is hard - the data stack is costly, difficult to use and still has limitations. Materialize breaks down those barriers with a true cloud-native streaming database - not simply a database that connects to streaming systems. With a PostgreSQL-compatible interface, you can now work with real-time data using ANSI SQL including the ability to perform multi-way complex joins, which support stream-to-stream, stream-to-table, table-to-table, and more, all in standard SQL. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/materialize today and sign up for early access to get started. If you like what you see and want to help make it better, they're hiring across all functions! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Aneesh Karve about how Quilt Data helps you bring order to your chaotic data in S3 with transactional versioning and data discovery built in

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Quilt is and the story behind it?

How have the goals and features of the Quilt platform changed since I spoke with Kevin in June of 2018?

What are the main problems that users are trying to solve when they find Quilt?

What are some of the alternative approaches/products that they are coming from?

How does Quilt compare with options such as LakeFS, Unstruk, Pachyderm, etc.? Can you describe how Quilt is implemented? What are the types of tools and systems that Quilt gets integrated with?

How do you manage the tension between supporting the lowest common denominator, while providing options for more advanced capabilities?

What is a typical workflow for a team that is using Quilt to manage their data? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Quilt used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Quilt? When is Quilt the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Quilt?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @akarve on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Quilt Data

Podcast Episode

UW Madison Docker Swarm Kaggle open.quiltdata.com FinOS Perspective LakeFS

Podcast Episode

Pachyderm

Podcast Episode

Unstruk

Podcast Episode

Parquet Avro ORC Cloudformation Troposphere CDK == Cloud Development Kit Shadow IT

Podcast Episode

Delta Lake

Podcast Episode

Apache Iceberg

Podcast Episode

Datasette Frictionless DVC

Podcast.init Episode

The in

Summary

This podcast started almost exactly six years ago, and the technology landscape was much different than it is now. In that time there have been a number of generational shifts in how data engineering is done. In this episode I reflect on some of the major themes and take a brief look forward at some of the upcoming changes.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm reflecting on the major trends in data engineering over the past 6 years

Interview

Introduction 6 years of running the Data Engineering Podcast Around the first time that data engineering was discussed as a role

Followed on from hype about "data science"

Hadoop era Streaming Lambda and Kappa architectures

Not really referenced anymore

"Big Data" era of capture everything has shifted to focusing on data that presents value

Regulatory environment increases risk, better tools introduce more capability to understand what data is useful

Data catalogs

Amundsen and Alation

Orchestration engine

Oozie, etc. -> Airflow and Luigi -> Dagster, Prefect, Lyft, etc. Orchestration is now a part of most vertical tools

Cloud data warehouses Data lakes DataOps and MLOps Data quality to data observability Metadata for everything

Data catalog -> data discovery -> active metadata

Business intelligence

Read only reports to metric/semantic layers Embedded analytics and data APIs

Rise of ELT

dbt Corresponding introduction of reverse ETL

What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on running the podcast? What do you have planned for the future of the podcast?

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

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

Looking for the simplest way to get the freshest data possible to your teams? Because let's face it: if real-time were easy, everyone would be using it. Look no further than Materialize, the streaming database you already know how to use.

Materialize’s PostgreSQL-compatible interface lets users leverage the tools they already use, with unsurpassed simplicity enabled by full ANSI SQL support. Delivered as a single platform with the separation of storage and compute, strict-serializability, active replication, horizontal scalability and workload isolation — Materialize is now the fastest way to build products with streaming data, drastically reducing the time, expertise, cost and maintenance traditionally associated with implementation of real-time features.

Sign up now for early access to Materialize and get started with the power of streaming data with the same simplicity and low implementation cost as batch cloud data warehouses.

Go to materialize.comSupport Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

Business intelligence has gone through many generational shifts, but each generation has largely maintained the same workflow. Data analysts create reports that are used by the business to understand and direct the business, but the process is very labor and time intensive. The team at Omni have taken a new approach by automatically building models based on the queries that are executed. In this episode Chris Merrick shares how they manage integration and automation around the modeling layer and how it improves the organizational experience of business intelligence.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Truly leveraging and benefiting from streaming data is hard - the data stack is costly, difficult to use and still has limitations. Materialize breaks down those barriers with a true cloud-native streaming database - not simply a database that connects to streaming systems. With a PostgreSQL-compatible interface, you can now work with real-time data using ANSI SQL including the ability to perform multi-way complex joins, which support stream-to-stream, stream-to-table, table-to-table, and more, all in standard SQL. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/materialize today and sign up for early access to get started. If you like what you see and want to help make it better, they're hiring across all functions! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Chris Merrick about the Omni Analytics platform and how they are adding automatic data modeling to your business intelligence

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Omni Analytics is and the story behind it?

What are the core goals that you are trying to achieve with building Omni?

Business intelligence has gone through many evolutions. What are the unique capabilities that Omni Analytics offers over other players in the market?

What are the technical and organizational anti-patterns that typically grow up around BI systems?

What are the elements that contribute to BI being such a difficult product to use effectively in an organization?

Can you describe how you have implemented the Omni platform?

How have the design/scope/goals of the product changed since you first started working on it?

What does the workflow for a team using Omni look like?

What are some of the developments in the broader ecosystem that have made your work possible?

What are some of the positive and negative inspirations that you have drawn from the experience that you and your team-mates have gained in previous businesses?

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Omni used?

What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Omni?

When is Omni the wrong choice?

What do you have planned for the future of Omni?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @cmerrick on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Omni Analytics Stitch RJ Metrics Looker

Podcast Episode

Singer dbt

Podcast Episode

Teradata Fivetran Apache Arrow

Podcast Episode

DuckDB

Podcast Episode

BigQuery Snowflake

Podcast Episode

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

Looking for the simplest way to get the freshest data possible to your teams? Because let's face it: if real-time were easy, everyone would be using it. Look no further than Materialize, the streaming database you already know how to use.

Materialize’s PostgreSQL-compatible interface lets users leverage the tools they already use, with unsurpassed simplicity enabled by full ANSI SQL support. Delivered as a single platform with the separation of storage and compute, strict-serializability, active replication, horizontal scalability and workload isolation — Materialize is now the fastest way to build products with streaming data, drastically reducing the time, expertise, cost and maintenance traditionally associated with implementation of real-time features.

Sign up now for early access to Materialize and get started with the power of streaming data with the same simplicity and low implementation cost as batch cloud data warehouses.

Go to materialize.comSupport Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

The most interesting and challenging bugs always happen in production, but recreating them is a constant challenge due to differences in the data that you are working with. Building your own scripts to replicate data from production is time consuming and error-prone. Tonic is a platform designed to solve the problem of having reliable, production-like data available for developing and testing your software, analytics, and machine learning projects. In this episode Adam Kamor explores the factors that make this such a complex problem to solve, the approach that he and his team have taken to turn it into a reliable product, and how you can start using it to replace your own collection of scripts.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Truly leveraging and benefiting from streaming data is hard - the data stack is costly, difficult to use and still has limitations. Materialize breaks down those barriers with a true cloud-native streaming database - not simply a database that connects to streaming systems. With a PostgreSQL-compatible interface, you can now work with real-time data using ANSI SQL including the ability to perform multi-way complex joins, which support stream-to-stream, stream-to-table, table-to-table, and more, all in standard SQL. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/materialize today and sign up for early access to get started. If you like what you see and want to help make it better, they're hiring across all functions! Data and analytics leaders, 2023 is your year to sharpen your leadership skills, refine your strategies and lead with purpose. Join your peers at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, March 20 – 22 in Orlando, FL for 3 days of expert guidance, peer networking and collaboration. Listeners can save $375 off standard rates with code GARTNERDA. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/gartnerda today to find out more. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Adam Kamor about Tonic, a service for generating data sets that are safe for development, analytics, and machine learning

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Tonic is and the story behind it? What are the core problems that you are trying to solve? What are some of the ways that fake or obfuscated data is used in development and analytics workflows? challenges of reliably subsetting data

impact of ORMs and bad habits developers get into with database modeling

Can you describe how Tonic is implemented?

What are the units of composition that you are building to allow for evolution and expansion of your product? How have the design and goals of the platform evolved since you started working on it?

Can you describe some of the different workflows that customers build on top of your various tools What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Tonic used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Tonic? When is Tonic the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Tonic?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @AdamKamor on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Tonic

Djinn

Django

Summary

The modern data stack has made it more economical to use enterprise grade technologies to power analytics at organizations of every scale. Unfortunately it has also introduced new overhead to manage the full experience as a single workflow. At the Modern Data Company they created the DataOS platform as a means of driving your full analytics lifecycle through code, while providing automatic knowledge graphs and data discovery. In this episode Srujan Akula explains how the system is implemented and how you can start using it today with your existing data systems.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Truly leveraging and benefiting from streaming data is hard - the data stack is costly, difficult to use and still has limitations. Materialize breaks down those barriers with a true cloud-native streaming database - not simply a database that connects to streaming systems. With a PostgreSQL-compatible interface, you can now work with real-time data using ANSI SQL including the ability to perform multi-way complex joins, which support stream-to-stream, stream-to-table, table-to-table, and more, all in standard SQL. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/materialize today and sign up for early access to get started. If you like what you see and want to help make it better, they're hiring across all functions! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the leading end-to-end Data Observability Platform! Trusted by the data teams at Fox, JetBlue, and PagerDuty, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, dbt models, Airflow jobs, and business intelligence tools, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks to just minutes. Monte Carlo also gives you a holistic picture of data health with automatic, end-to-end lineage from ingestion to the BI layer directly out of the box. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. Data and analytics leaders, 2023 is your year to sharpen your leadership skills, refine your strategies and lead with purpose. Join your peers at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, March 20 – 22 in Orlando, FL for 3 days of expert guidance, peer networking and collaboration. Listeners can save $375 off standard rates with code GARTNERDA. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/gartnerda today to find out more. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Srujan Akula about DataOS, a pre-integrated and managed data platform built by The Modern Data Company

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what your mission at The Modern Data Company is and the story behind it? Your flagship (only?) product is a platform that you're calling DataOS. What is the scope and goal of that platform?

Who is the target audience?

On your site you refer to the idea of "data as software". What are the principles and ways of thinking that are encompassed by that concept?

What are the platform capabilities that are required to make it possible?

There are 11 "Key Features" listed on your site for the DataOS. What was your process for identifying the "must have" vs "nice to have" features for launching the platform? Can you describe the technical architecture that powers your DataOS product?

What are the core principles that you are optimizing for in the design of your platform? How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved since you started working on DataOS?

Can you describe the workflow for the different practitioners and stakeholders working on an installation of DataOS? What are the interfaces and escape hatches that are available for integrating with and ext

Summary

Managing end-to-end data flows becomes complex and unwieldy as the scale of data and its variety of applications in an organization grows. Part of this complexity is due to the transformation and orchestration of data living in disparate systems. The team at Upsolver is taking aim at this problem with the latest iteration of their platform in the form of SQLake. In this episode Ori Rafael explains how they are automating the creation and scheduling of orchestration flows and their related transforations in a unified SQL interface.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Data and analytics leaders, 2023 is your year to sharpen your leadership skills, refine your strategies and lead with purpose. Join your peers at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, March 20 – 22 in Orlando, FL for 3 days of expert guidance, peer networking and collaboration. Listeners can save $375 off standard rates with code GARTNERDA. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/gartnerda today to find out more. Truly leveraging and benefiting from streaming data is hard - the data stack is costly, difficult to use and still has limitations. Materialize breaks down those barriers with a true cloud-native streaming database - not simply a database that connects to streaming systems. With a PostgreSQL-compatible interface, you can now work with real-time data using ANSI SQL including the ability to perform multi-way complex joins, which support stream-to-stream, stream-to-table, table-to-table, and more, all in standard SQL. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/materialize today and sign up for early access to get started. If you like what you see and want to help make it better, they're hiring across all functions! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the leading end-to-end Data Observability Platform! Trusted by the data teams at Fox, JetBlue, and PagerDuty, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, dbt models, Airflow jobs, and business intelligence tools, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks to just minutes. Monte Carlo also gives you a holistic picture of data health with automatic, end-to-end lineage from ingestion to the BI layer directly out of the box. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Ori Rafael about the SQLake feature for the Upsolver platform that automatically generates pipelines from your queries

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what the SQLake product is and the story behind it?

What is the core problem that you are trying to solve?

What are some of the anti-patterns that you have seen teams adopt when designing and implementing DAGs in a tool such as Airlow? What are the benefits of merging the logic for transformation and orchestration into the same interface and dialect (SQL)? Can you describe the technical implementation of the SQLake feature? What does the workflow look like for designing and deploying pipelines in SQLake? What are the opportunities for using utilities such as dbt for managing logical complexity as the number of pipelines scales?

SQL has traditionally been challenging to compose. How did that factor into your design process for how to structure the dialect extensions for job scheduling?

What are some of the complexities that you have had to address in your orchestration system to be able to manage timeliness of operations as volume and complexity of the data scales? What are some of the edge cases that you have had to provide escape hatches for? What are the most interesting, innova

Summary

With all of the messaging about treating data as a product it is becoming difficult to know what that even means. Vishal Singh is the head of products at Starburst which means that he has to spend all of his time thinking and talking about the details of product thinking and its application to data. In this episode he shares his thoughts on the strategic and tactical elements of moving your work as a data professional from being task-oriented to being product-oriented and the long term improvements in your productivity that it provides.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don't forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Vishal Singh about his experience

Summary

Encryption and security are critical elements in data analytics and machine learning applications. We have well developed protocols and practices around data that is at rest and in motion, but security around data in use is still severely lacking. Recognizing this shortcoming and the capabilities that could be unlocked by a robust solution Rishabh Poddar helped to create Opaque Systems as an outgrowth of his PhD studies. In this episode he shares the work that he and his team have done to simplify integration of secure enclaves and trusted computing environments into analytical workflows and how you can start using it without re-engineering your existing systems.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don't forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today an

Summary

The data ecosystem has seen a constant flurry of activity for the past several years, and it shows no signs of slowing down. With all of the products, techniques, and buzzwords being discussed it can be easy to be overcome by the hype. In this episode Juan Sequeda and Tim Gasper from data.world share their views on the core principles that you can use to ground your work and avoid getting caught in the hype cycles.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don't forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Juan Sequeda and Tim Gasper about their views on the role of the data mesh paradigm for driving re-assessment of the foundational principles of data systems

Summary One of the most critical aspects of software projects is managing its data. Managing the operational concerns for your database can be complex and expensive, especially if you need to scale to large volumes of data, high traffic, or geographically distributed usage. Planetscale is a serverless option for your MySQL workloads that lets you focus on your applications without having to worry about managing the database or fight with differences between development and production. In this episode Nick van Wiggeren explains how the Planetscale platform is implemented, their strategies for balancing maintenance and improvements of the underlying Vitess project with their business goals, and how you can start using it today to free up the time you spend on database administration.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast l

Summary The term "real-time data" brings with it a combination of excitement, uncertainty, and skepticism. The promise of insights that are always accurate and up to date is appealing to organizations, but the technical realities to make it possible have been complex and expensive. In this episode Arjun Narayan explains how the technical barriers to adopting real-time data in your analytics and applications have become surmountable by organizations of all sizes.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Arjun Narayan about the benefits of real-time data for teams of all sizes

Interview

Introduction How did you ge

Summary The most expensive part of working with massive data sets is the work of retrieving and processing the files that contain the raw information. FeatureBase (formerly Pilosa) avoids that overhead by converting the data into bitmaps. In this episode Matt Jaffee explains how to model your data as bitmaps and the benefits that this representation provides for fast aggregate computation. He also discusses the improvements that have been incorporated into FeatureBase to simplify integration with the rest of your data stack, and the SQL interface that was added to make working with the product easier.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell. Your host is Tobias Macey

Summary The problems that are easiest to fix are the ones that you prevent from happening in the first place. Sifflet is a platform that brings your entire data stack into focus to improve the reliability of your data assets and empower collaboration across your teams. In this episode CEO and founder Salma Bakouk shares her views on the causes and impacts of "data entropy" and how you can tame it before it leads to failures.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Salma Bakouk about achieving data reliability and reducing entropy within your data stack with sifflet

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Sifflet is and the st

Summary Building data products is an undertaking that has historically required substantial investments of time and talent. With the rise in cloud platforms and self-serve data technologies the barrier of entry is dropping. Shane Gibson co-founded AgileData to make analytics accessible to companies of all sizes. In this episode he explains the design of the platform and how it builds on agile development principles to help you focus on delivering value.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is the metadata hub for your data ecosystem. Instead of locking your metadata into a new silo, unleash its transformative potential with Atlan’s active metadata capabilities. Push information about data freshness and quality to your business intelligence, automatically scale up and down your warehouse based on usage patterns, and let the bots answer those questions in Slack so that the humans can focus on delivering real value. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today to learn more about how Atlan’s active metadata platform is helping pioneering data teams like Postman, Plaid, WeWork & Unilever achieve extraordinary things with metadata and escape the chaos. Prefect is the modern Dataflow Automation platform for the modern data stack, empowering data practitioners to build, run and monitor robust pipelines at scale. Guided by the principle that the orchestrator shouldn’t get in your way, Prefect is the only tool of its kind to offer the flexibility to write code as workflows. Prefect specializes in glueing together the disparate pieces of a pipeline, and integrating with modern distributed compute libraries to bring power where you need it, when you need it. Trusted by thousands of organizations and supported by over 20,000 community members, Prefect powers over 100MM business critical tasks a month. For more information on Prefect, visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/prefect. Data engineers don’t enjoy writing, maintaining, and modifying ETL pipelines all day, every day. Especially once they realize 90% of all major data sources like Google Analytics, Salesforce, Adwords, Facebook, Spreadsheets, etc., are already available as plug-and-play connectors with reliable, intuitive SaaS solutions. Hevo Data is a highly reliable and intuitive data pipeline platform used by data engineers from 40+ countries to set up and run low-latency ELT pipelines with zero maintenance. Boasting more than 150 out-of-the-box connectors that can be set up in minutes, Hevo also allows you to monitor and control your pipelines. You get: real-time data flow visibility, fail-safe mechanisms, and alerts if anything breaks; preload transformations and auto-schema mapping precisely control how data lands in your destination; models and workflows to transform data for analytics; and reverse-ETL capability to move the transformed data back to your business software to inspire timely action. All of this, plus its transparent pricing and 24*7 live support, makes it consistently voted by users as the Leader in the Data Pipeline category on review platforms like G2. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/hevodata and sign up for a free 14-day trial that also comes with 24×7 support. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Shane Gibson about AgileData

Summary CreditKarma builds data products that help consumers take advantage of their credit and financial capabilities. To make that possible they need a reliable data platform that empowers all of the organization’s stakeholders. In this episode Vishnu Venkataraman shares the journey that he and his team have taken to build and evolve their systems and improve the product offerings that they are able to support.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Vishnu Venkataraman about building the data platform at CreditKarma and the forces that shaped the design

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what CreditKarma is and the role

Summary Despite the best efforts of data engineers, data is as messy as the real world. Entity resolution and fuzzy matching are powerful utilities for cleaning up data from disconnected sources, but it has typically required custom development and training machine learning models. Sonal Goyal created and open-sourced Zingg as a generalized tool for data mastering and entity resolution to reduce the effort involved in adopting those practices. In this episode she shares the story behind the project, the details of how it is implemented, and how you can use it for your own data 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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sonal Goyal about Zingg, an open source entity resolution frame

Summary One of the most impactful technologies for data analytics in recent years has been dbt. It’s hard to have a conversation about data engineering or analysis without mentioning it. Despite its widespread adoption there are still rough edges in its workflow that cause friction for data analysts. To help simplify the adoption and management of dbt projects Nandam Karthik helped create Optimus. In this episode he shares his experiences working with organizations to adopt analytics engineering patterns and the ways that Optimus and dbt were combined to let data analysts deliver insights without the roadblocks of complex pipeline management.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Nand

Summary The database market has seen unprecedented activity in recent years, with new options addressing a variety of needs being introduced on a nearly constant basis. Despite that, there are a handful of databases that continue to be adopted due to their proven reliability and robust features. MariaDB is one of those default options that has continued to grow and innovate while offering a familiar and stable experience. In this episode field CTO Manjot Singh shares his experiences as an early user of MySQL and MariaDB and explains how the suite of products being built on top of the open source foundation address the growing needs for advanced storage and analytical capabilities.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You wake up to a Slack message from your CEO, who’s upset because the company’s revenue dashboard is broken. You’re told to fix it before this morning’s board meeting, which is just minutes away. Enter Metaplane, the industry’s only self-serve data observability tool. In just a few clicks, you identify the issue’s root cause, conduct an impact analysis⁠—and save the day. Data leaders at Imperfect Foods, Drift, and Vendr love Metaplane because it helps them catch, investigate, and fix data quality issues before their stakeholders ever notice they exist. Setup takes 30 minutes. You can literally get up and running with Metaplane by the end of this podcast. Sign up for a free-forever plan at dataengineeringpodcast.com/metaplane, or try out their most advanced features with a 14-day free trial. Mention the podcast to get a free "In Data We Trust World Tour" t-shirt. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when

Summary The "data lakehouse" architecture balances the scalability and flexibility of data lakes with the ease of use and transaction support of data warehouses. Dremio is one of the companies leading the development of products and services that support the open lakehouse. In this episode Jason Hughes explains what it means for a lakehouse to be "open" and describes the different components that the Dremio team build and contribute to.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You wake up to a Slack message from your CEO, who’s upset because the company’s revenue dashboard is broken. You’re told to fix it before this morning’s board meeting, which is just minutes away. Enter Metaplane, the industry’s only self-serve data observability tool. In just a few clicks, you identify the issue’s root cause, conduct an impact analysis⁠—and save the day. Data leaders at Imperfect Foods, Drift, and Vendr love Metaplane because it helps them catch, investigate, and fix data quality issues before their stakeholders ever notice they exist. Setup takes 30 minutes. You can literally get up and running with Metaplane by the end of this podcast. Sign up for a free-forever plan at dataengineeringpodcast.com/metaplane, or try out their most advanced features with a 14-day free trial. Mention the podcast to get a free "In Data We Trust World Tour" t-shirt. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Jason Hughes about the work that Dremio is doing to support the open lakehouse

Interview

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

Summary For any business that wants to stay in operation, the most important thing they can do is understand their customers. American Express has invested substantial time and effort in their Customer 360 product to achieve that understanding. In this episode Purvi Shah, the VP of Enterprise Big Data Platforms at American Express, explains how they have invested in the cloud to power this visibility and the complex suite of integrations they have built and maintained across legacy and modern systems to make it possible.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You wake up to a Slack message from your CEO, who’s upset because the company’s revenue dashboard is broken. You’re told to fix it before this morning’s board meeting, which is just minutes away. Enter Metaplane, the industry’s only self-serve data observability tool. In just a few clicks, you identify the issue’s root cause, conduct an impact analysis⁠—and save the day. Data leaders at Imperfect Foods, Drift, and Vendr love Metaplane because it helps them catch, investigate, and fix data quality issues before their stakeholders ever notice they exist. Setup takes 30 minutes. You can literally get up and running with Metaplane by the end of this podcast. Sign up for a free-forever plan at dataengineeringpodcast.com/metaplane, or try out their most advanced features with a 14-day free trial. Mention the podcast to get a free "In Data We Trust World Tour" t-shirt. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Purvi Shah about building the Customer 360 data product for American Express and mig

Summary Data lineage is something that has grown from a convenient feature to a critical need as data systems have grown in scale, complexity, and centrality to business. Alvin is a platform that aims to provide a low effort solution for data lineage capabilities focused on simplifying the work of data engineers. In this episode co-founder Martin Sahlen explains the impact that easy access to lineage information can have on the work of data engineers and analysts, and how he and his team have designed their platform to offer that information to engineers and stakeholders in the places that they interact with data.

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 their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You wake up to a Slack message from your CEO, who’s upset because the company’s revenue dashboard is broken. You’re told to fix it before this morning’s board meeting, which is just minutes away. Enter Metaplane, the industry’s only self-serve data observability tool. In just a few clicks, you identify the issue’s root cause, conduct an impact analysis⁠—and save the day. Data leaders at Imperfect Foods, Drift, and Vendr love Metaplane because it helps them catch, investigate, and fix data quality issues before their stakeholders ever notice they exist. Setup takes 30 minutes. You can literally get up and running with Metaplane by the end of this podcast. Sign up for a free-forever plan at dataengineeringpodcast.com/metaplane, or try out their most advanced features with a 14-day free trial. Mention the podcast to get a free "In Data We Trust World Tour" t-shirt. RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Martin Sahlen about his work on data lineage at Alvin and how it factors into the day-to-day work of data engineers

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Alvin is and the story behind it? What is the core problem that you are trying to solve at Alvin? Data lineage has quickly become an overloaded term. What are the elements of lineage that you are focused on addressing?

What are some of the other sources/pieces of information that you integrate into the lineage graph?

How does data lineage show up in the work of data engineers?

In what ways does your focus on data engineers inform the way that you model the lineage information?

As with every data asset/product, the lineage graph is only as useful as the data that it stores. What are some of the ways that you focus on establishing and ensuring a complete view of lineage?

How do you account for assets (e.g. tables, dashboards, exports, etc.) that are created outside of the "officially supported" methods? (e.g. someone manually runs a SQL create statement, etc.)

Can you describe how you have implemented the Alvin platform?

How have the design and goals shifted from when you first started exploring the problem?

What are the types of data systems/assets that you are focused on supporting? (e.g. data warehouses vs. lakes, structured vs. unstructured, which BI tools, etc.) How does Alvin fit into the workflow of data engineers and their downstream customers/collaborators?

What are some of the design choices (both visual and functional) that you focused on to avoid friction in the data engineer’s workflow?

What are some of the open questions/areas for investigation/improvement in the space of data lineage?

What are the factors that contribute to the difficulty of a truly holistic and complete view of lineage across an organization?

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Alvin used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Alvin? When is Alvin the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Alvin?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @martinsahlen on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Alvin Unacast sqlparse Python library Cython

Podcast.init Episode

Antlr Kotlin programming language PostgreSQL

Podcast Episode

OpenSearch ElasticSearch Redis Kubernetes Airflow BigQuery Spark Looker Mode

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

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