In this episode, Tristan Handy sits down with Chang She — a co-creator of Pandas and now CEO of LanceDB — to explore the convergence of analytics and AI engineering. The team at LanceDB is rebuilding the data lake from the ground up with AI as a first principle, starting with a new AI-native file format called Lance. Tristan traces Chang's journey as one of the original contributors to the pandas library to building a new infrastructure layer for AI-native data. Learn why vector databases alone aren't enough, why agents require new architecture, and how LanceDB is building a AI lakehouse for the future. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Tristan talks with Mikkel Dengsøe, co-founder at SYNQ, to break down what agentic coding looks like in analytics engineering. Mikkel walks through a hands-on project using Cursor, the dbt MCP server, Omni's AI assistant, and Snowflake. They cover where agents shine (staging, unit tests, lineage-aware checks), where they're risky (BI chat for non-experts), and how observability is shifting from dashboards to root-cause explanations. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Tristan digs deep into the world of Apache Iceberg. There's a lot happening beneath the surface: multiple catalog interfaces, evolving REST specs, and competing implementations across open source, proprietary, and academic contexts. Christian Thiel, co-founder of Lakekeeper, one of the most widely used Iceberg catalogs, joins to walk through the state of the Iceberg ecosystem. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

What does it mean to be agentic? Is there a spectrum of agency?  In this episode of The Analytics Engineering Podcast, Tristan Handy talks to Sean Falconer, senior director of AI strategy at Confluent, about AI agents. They discuss what truly makes software "agentic," where agents are successfully being deployed, and how to conceptualize and build agents within enterprise infrastructure.  Sean shares practical ideas about the changing trends in AI, the role of basic models, and why agents may be better for businesses than for consumers. This episode will give you a clear, practical idea of how AI agents can change businesses, instead of being a vague marketing buzzword. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

In this season of the Analytics Engineering podcast, Tristan is deep into the world of developer tools and databases. If you're following us here, you've almost definitely used Amazon S3 it and its Blob Storage siblings. They form the foundation for nearly all data work in the cloud. In many ways, it was the innovations that happened inside of S3 that have unlocked all of the progress in cloud data over the last decade. In this episode, Tristan talks with Andy Warfield, VP and senior principal engineer at AWS, where he focuses primarily on storage. They go deep on S3, how it works, and what it unlocks. They close out italking about Iceberg, S3 table buckets, and what this all suggests about the outlines of the S3 product roadmap moving forward. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

In this season of the Analytics Engineering podcast, Tristan is digging deep into the world of developer tools and databases. There are few more widely used developer tools than Docker. From its launch back in 2013, Docker has completely changed how developers ship applications.  In this episode, Tristan talks to Solomon Hykes, the founder and creator of Docker. They trace Docker's rise from startup obscurity to becoming foundational infrastructure in modern software development. Solomon explains the technical underpinnings of containerization, the pivotal shift from platform-as-a-service to open-source engine, and why Docker's developer experience was so revolutionary.  The conversation also dives into his next venture Dagger, and how it aims to solve the messy, overlooked workflows of software delivery. Bonus: Solomon shares how AI agents are reshaping how CI/CD gets done and why the next revolution in DevOps might already be here. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

In this decades-spanning episode, Tristan Handy sits down with Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Partners and former CEO of Syncsort (now Precisely), to trace the history of the data ecosystem—from its mainframe origins to its AI-infused future. Lonne reflects on the evolution of ETL, the unexpected staying power of legacy tech, and why AI may finally erode the switching costs that have long protected incumbents. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

In this episode, Tristan talks to Zach Lloyd, founder of Warp—a terminal built for the modern era, including for AI agents. They explore the history of terminals, differences between terminals and shells, and what the future might look like. In a world driven by generative AI, the terminal could once again be the control center of computer usage. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

In this episode, Tristan Handy and Lukas Schulte, co-founder of SDF Labs and now part of dbt Labs, dive deep into the world of compilers—what they are, how they work, and what they mean for the data ecosystem. SDF, recently acquired by dbt Labs, builds a world-class SQL compiler aimed at abstracting away the complexity of warehouse-specific SQL. Join Tristan and members of the SDF team at the dbt Launch showcase to learn more about the brand new dbt engine. Register at https://www.getdbt.com/resources/webinars/2025-dbt-cloud-launch-showcase For full show notes and to read 8+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

A look inside at the data work happening at a company making some of the most advanced technologies in the industry. Rahul Jain, data engineering manager at Snowflake, joins Tristan to discuss Iceberg, streaming, and all things Snowflake.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Hamilton Ulmer is working at the intersection of UI, Exploratory Data Analysis, and SQL at MotherDuck, and he's built a long career in EDA. Hamilton and Tristan dive deep into the history of exploratory data analysis. Even if you spend most of your time below the frontend layer of the stack, it is important to understand the trends in both the practice of data visualization  and the technologies that underlie that practice. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Cedric Chin runs Commoncog—a publication about accelerating business expertise. He joins Tristan to talk about the analytics development lifecycle, how organizations value (or misvalue) data, and why "data teams are not some IT helpdesk to be ignored."   For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Erik Bernhardsson, the CEO and co-founder of Modal Labs, joins Tristan to talk about Gen AI, the lack of GPUs, the future of cloud computing, and egress fees. They also discuss whether the job title of data engineer is something we should want more or less of in the future. Erik's not afraid of a spicy take, so this is a fun one.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Show description: Scott Breitenother, founder of data consultancy Brooklyn Data Co., joins Tristan at Coalesce 2024 in Las Vegas to discuss the early days of dbt, the evolution of data teams, and what's next for the dbt community. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Nisha Paliwal, who leads enterprise data tech at Capital One, joins Tristan to discuss building a strong data culture for in the world of AI. She is the co-author of the book Secrets of AI Value Creation.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Dr. Eirini Kalliamvakou is a senior researcher at GitHub Next. Eirini has built a career on studying software engineers, how to measure their productivity, how developer experience impacts productivity, and more. Recently, Eirini has been working on quantifying the impacts of GitHub Copilot. Does it actually help software engineers be more productive? Tristan and Eirini explore how to quantify developer productivity in the first place, and finally, arriving at whether or not Copilot‌ makes a difference. In the search for real business value, this research is a real bellwether of things to come. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Join data practitioners and data leaders this October in Las Vegas at Coalesce, the analytics engineering conference hosted by dbt Labs. Register now at coalesece.getdbt.com. Listeners of this show can use the code podcast20 for a 20% discount.

Misha Panko has worked in data for a long time, including on high performance data teams at Uber and Google. Today, Misha is the co-founder and CEO of Motif Analytics, a product focused on helping growth and ops teams understand their event data. In this episode, Tristan and Misha nerd out about the state of the art in computational neuroscience, where Misha got his PhD. They then go deep into event stream data and how it differs from classical fact and dimension data, and why it needs different analytical tools. Make sure to check out the back half of the episode, where they dive into AI and how Motif is applying breakthroughs in language modeling to train foundation models of event sequences—check out his team's blog post on their work. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Eric Avidon is a journalist at TechTarget who's interviewed Tristan a few times, and now Tristan gets to flip the script and interview Eric. Eric is a journalist veteran, covering everything from finance to the Boston Red Sox, but now he spends a lot of time with vendors in the data space and has a broad view of what's going on. Eric and Tristan discuss AI and analytics and how mature these features really are today, data quality and its importance, the AI strategies of Snowflake and Databricks, and a lot more. Plus, part way through you can hear Tristan reacting to a mild earthquake that hit the East Coast. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

Barry McCardel is the co-founder and CEO of Hex. Hex is an analytics tool that's structured around a notebook experience, but as you'll hear in the episode, goes well beyond the traditional notebook. We're big fans of Hex at dbt Labs, and use it for a bunch of our internal data work. In this episode, Barry and Tristan discuss notebooks and data analysis, before zooming out to discuss the hype cycle of data science, how AI is different, the experience of building AI products, and how AI will impact data practitioners. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Matt Turck has been publishing his ecosystem map since 2012. It was first called the Big Data Landscape. Now it's the Machine Learning, AI & Data (MAD) Landscape.  The 2024 MAD Landscape includes 2,011(!) logos, which Matt attributes first a data infrastructure cycle and now an ML/AI cycle. As Matt writes, "Those two waves are intimately related. A core idea of the MAD Landscape every year has been to show the symbiotic relationship between data infrastructure, analytics/BI,  ML/AI, and applications." Matt and Tristan discuss themes in Matt's post: generative AI's impact on data analytics, the modern AI stack compared to the modern data stack, and Databricks vs. Snowflake (plus Microsoft Fabric). For full show notes and to read 7+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Matthew Lynley is a bit of a hybrid. He's been a long-time journalist covering enterprise tech, currently in his fantastic AI and data newsletter Supervised, and he's also been a hands-on data practitioner.  Matthew has covered the analytics tech stack, but this time Tristan turns the tables to get Matthew's perspective on the rise of Gen AI as a topic in the popular press, what's going on in the space today, and where AI is headed. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

If Data Vault is a new term for you, it's a data modeling design pattern. We're joined by Brandon Taylor, a senior data architect at Guild, and Michael Olschimke, who is the CEO of Scalefree—the consulting firm whose co-founder Dan Lindstedt is credited as the designer of the data vault architecture.  In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Michael and Brandon explore the Data Vault approach among data warehouse design methodologies. They discuss Data Vault's adoption in Europe, its alignment with data mesh architecture, and the ongoing debate over Data Vault vs. Kimball methods.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Jonathan Frankle is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML, which was recently bought by Databricks for $1.3 billion.  MosaicML helps customers train generative AI models on their data. Lots of companies are excited about gen AI, and the hope is that their company data and information will be what sets them apart from the competition.  In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Jonathan discusses a potential future where you can train specialized, purpose-built models, the future of MosaicML inside of Databricks, and the importance of responsible AI practices. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

In this conversation with Tristan recorded at Coalesce 2023, Kasey Mazza, an analytics engineering manager on the RevOps team at HubSpot, discusses the roles of data analysts and analytics engineers, the importance of building internal data communities, and the evolving landscape of data teams.  Watch Kasey's Coalescse 2023 presentation The career growth software development lifecycle. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Ian Macomber, head of analytics engineering and data science at Ramp and formerly the VP of analytics and data engineering at Drizly, and Ryan Delgado, a staff software engineer at Ramp, have played pivotal roles in establishing Ramp's data team from the ground up and are spearheading the development of their comprehensive roadmap. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Ian and Ryan share insights on how Ramp's data team transformed unstructured data from contracts into valuable insights to enable faster decision-making. The $8 billion company values speed and empowers teams to build, ship, and measure products quickly. Ian and Ryan also talked about their approach to adopting new tech and elevating data as an equal player alongside product engineering and design. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.