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

Unlocking the value of modern data is critical for data-driven companies. This report provides a concise, practical guide to building a data architecture that efficiently delivers big, complex, and streaming data to both internal users and customers. Authors Ori Rafael, Roy Hasson, and Rick Bilodeau from Upsolver examine how modern data pipelines can improve business outcomes. Tech leaders and data engineers will explore the role these pipelines play in the data architecture and learn how to intelligently consider tradeoffs between different data architecture patterns and data pipeline development approaches. You will: Examine how recent changes in data, data management systems, and data consumption patterns have made data pipelines challenging to engineer Learn how three data architecture patterns (event sourcing, stateful streaming, and declarative data pipelines) can help you upgrade your practices to address modern data Compare five approaches for building modern data pipelines, including pure data replication, ELT over a data warehouse, Apache Spark over data lakes, declarative pipelines over data lakes, and declarative data lake staging to a data warehouse

Summary One of the perennial challenges posed by data lakes is how to keep them up to date as new data is collected. With the improvements in streaming engines it is now possible to perform all of your data integration in near real time, but it can be challenging to understand the proper processing patterns to make that performant. In this episode Ori Rafael shares his experiences from Upsolver and building scalable stream processing for integrating and analyzing data, and what the tradeoffs are when coming from a batch oriented mindset.

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 managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription 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. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ori Rafael about strategies for building stream and batch processing patterns for data lake analytics

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of the state of the market for data lakes today?

What are the prevailing architectural and technological patterns that are being used to manage these systems?

Batch and streaming systems have been used in various combinations since the early days of Hadoop. The Lambda architecture has largely been abandoned, so what is the answer for today’s data lakes? What are the challenges presented by streaming approaches to data transformations?

The batch model for processing is intuitive despite its latency problems. What are the benefits that it provides?

The core concept for data orchestration is the DAG. How does that manifest in a streaming context? In batch processing idempotent/immutable datasets are created by re-running the entire pipeline when logic changes need to be made. Given that there is no definitive start or end of a stream, what are the options for amending logical errors in transformations? What are some of the da

Summary Data lakes offer a great deal of flexibility and the potential for reduced cost for your analytics, but they also introduce a great deal of complexity. What used to be entirely managed by the database engine is now a composition of multiple systems that need to be properly configured to work in concert. In order to bring the DBA into the new era of data management the team at Upsolver added a SQL interface to their data lake platform. In this episode Upsolver CEO Ori Rafael and CTO Yoni Iny describe how they have grown their platform deliberately to allow for layering SQL on top of a robust foundation for creating and operating a data lake, how to bring more people on board to work with the data being collected, and the unique benefits that a data lake provides. This was an interesting look at the impact that the interface to your data can have on who is empowered to work with it.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management What are the pieces of advice that you wish you had received early in your career of data engineering? If you hand a book to a new data engineer, what wisdom would you add to it? I’m working with O’Reilly on a project to collect the 97 things that every data engineer should know, and I need your help. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/97things to add your voice and share your hard-earned expertise. 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 managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $60 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show because you love working with data and want to keep your skills up to date. Machine learning is finding its way into every aspect of the data landscape. Springboard has partnered with us to help you take the next step in your career by offering a scholarship to their Machine Learning Engineering career track program. In this online, project-based course every student is paired with a Machine Learning expert who provides unlimited 1:1 mentorship support throughout the program via video conferences. You’ll build up your portfolio of machine learning projects and gain hands-on experience in writing machine learning algorithms, deploying models into production, and managing the lifecycle of a deep learning prototype. Springboard offers a job guarantee, meaning that you don’t have to pay for the program until you get a job in the space. The Data Engineering Podcast is exclusively offering listeners 20 scholarships of $500 to eligible applicants. It only takes 10 minutes and there’s no obligation. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/springboard and apply today! Make sure to use the code AISPRINGBOARD when you enroll. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ori Rafael and Yoni Iny about building a data lake for the DBA at Upsolver

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by sharing your definition of what a data lake is and what it is comprised of? We talked last in November of 2018. How has the landscape of data lake technologies and adoption changed in that time?

How has Upsolver changed or evolved since we last spoke?

How has the evolution of the underlying technologies impacted your implementation and overall product strategy?

What are some of the common challenges that accompany a data lake implementation? How do those challenges influence the adoption or viability of a data lake? How does the introduction of a universal SQL layer change the staffing requirements for building and maintaining a data lake?

What are the advantages of a data lake over a data warehouse if everything is being managed via SQL anyway?

What are some of the underlying realities of the data systems that power the lake which will eventually need to be understood by the operators of the platform? How is the SQL layer in Upsolver implemented?

What are the most challenging or complex aspects of managing the underlying technologies to provide automated partitioning, indexing, etc.?

What are the main concepts that you need to educate your customers on? What are some of the pitfalls that users should be aware of? What features of your platform are often overlooked or underutilized which you think should be more widely adopted? What have you found to be the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons learned while building the technical and business elements of Upsolver? What do you have planned for the future?

Contact Info

Ori

LinkedIn

Yoni

yoniiny on GitHub LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Upsolver

Podcast Episode

DBA == Database Administrator IDF == Israel Defense Forces Data Lake Eventual Consistency Apache Spark Redshift Spectrum Azure Synapse Analytics SnowflakeDB

Podcast Episode

BigQuery Presto

Podcast Episode

Apache Kafka Cartesian Product kSQLDB

Podcast Episode

Eventador

Podcast Episode

Materialize

Podcast Episode

Common Table Expressions Lambda Architecture Kappa Architecture Apache Flink

Podcast Episode

Reinforcement Learning Cloudformation GDPR

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

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