Summary

A significant portion of the time spent by data engineering teams is on managing the workflows and operations of their pipelines. DataOps has arisen as a parallel set of practices to that of DevOps teams as a means of reducing wasted effort. Agile Data Engine is a platform designed to handle the infrastructure side of the DataOps equation, as well as providing the insights that you need to manage the human side of the workflow. In this episode Tevje Olin explains how the platform is implemented, the features that it provides to reduce the amount of effort required to keep your pipelines running, and how you can start using it in your own team.

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 Tevje Olin about Agile Data Engine, a platform that combines data modeling, transformations, continuous delivery and workload orchestration to help you manage your data products and the whole lifecycle of your warehouse

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Agile Data Engine is and the story behind it? What are some of the tools and architectures that an organization might be able to replace with Agile Data Engine?

How does the unified experience of Agile Data Engine change the way that teams think about the lifecycle of their data? What are some of the types of experiments that are enabled by reduced operational overhead?

What does CI/CD look like for a data warehouse?

How is it different from CI/CD for software applications?

Can you describe how Agile Data Engine is architected?

How have the design and goals of the system changed since you first started working on it? What are the components that you needed to develop in-house to enable your platform goals?

What are the changes in the broader data ecosystem that have had the most influence on your product goals and customer adoption? Can you describe the workflow for a team that is using Agile Data Engine to power their business analytics?

What are some of the insights that you generate to help your customers understand how to improve their processes or identify new opportunities?

In your "about" page it mentions the unique approaches that you take for warehouse automation. How do your practices differ from the rest of the industry? How have changes in the adoption/implementation of ML and AI impacted the ways that your customers exercise your platform? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen the Agile Data Engine platform used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Agile Data Engine? When is Agile Data Engine the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Agile Data Engine?

Guest Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

About Agile Data Engine

Agile Data Engine unlocks the potential of your data to drive business value - in a rapidly changing world. Agile Data Engine is a DataOps Management platform for designing, deploying, operating and managing data products, and managing the whole lifecycle of a data warehouse. It combines data modeling, transformations, continuous delivery and workload orchestration into the same platform.

Links

Agile Data Engine Bill Inmon Ralph Kimball Snowflake Redshift BigQuery Azure Synapse Airflow

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 pipelines in one platform. You can collect, transform, and route data across your entire stack with its event streaming, ETL, and reverse ETL pipelines.

RudderStack’s warehouse-first approach means it does not store sensitive information, and it allows you to leverage your existing data warehouse/data lake infrastructure to build a single source of truth for every team.

RudderStack also supports real-time use cases. You can Implement RudderStack SDKs once, then automatically send events to your warehouse and 150+ business tools, and you’ll never have to worry about API changes again.

Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack to sign up for free today, and snag a free T-Shirt just for being a Data Engineering Podcast listener.Support Data Engineering Podcast

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 Agile methodologies have been adopted by a majority of teams for building software applications. Applying those same practices to data can prove challenging due to the number of systems that need to be included to implement a complete feature. In this episode Shane Gibson shares practical advice and insights from his years of experience as a consultant and engineer working in data about how to adopt agile principles in your data work so that you can move faster and provide more value to the business, while building systems that are maintainable and adaptable.

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 how to bring Agile practices to your data management workflows

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what AgileData is and the story behind it? What are the main industries and/or use cases that you are focused on supporting? The data ecosystem has been trying on different paradigms from software development for some time now (e.g. DataOps, version control, etc.). What are the aspects of Agile that do and don’t map well to data engineering/analysis? One of the perennial challenges of data analysis is how to approach data modeling. How do you balance the need to provide value with the long-term impacts of incomplete or underinformed modeling decisions made in haste at the beginning of a project?

How do you design in affordances for refactoring of the data models without breaking downstream assets?

Another aspect of implementing data products/platforms is how to manage permissions and governance. What are the incremental ways that those principles can be incorporated early and evolved along with the overall analytical products? What are some of the organizational design strategies that you find most helpful when establishing or training a team who is working on data products? In order to have a useful target to work toward it’s necessary to understand what the data consumers are hoping to achieve. What are some of the challenges of doing requirements gathering for data products? (e.g. not knowing what information is available, consumers not understanding what’s hard vs. easy, etc.)

How do you work with the "customers" to help them understand what a reasonable scope is and translate that to the actual project stages for the engineers?

What are some of the perennial questions or points of confusion that you have had to address with your clients on how to design and implement analytical assets? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen agile principles used for data? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on AgileData? When is agile the wrong choice for a data project? What do you have planned for the future of AgileData?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @shagility 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

AgileData OptimalBI How To Make Toast Data Mesh Information Product Canvas DataKitchen

Podcast Episode

Great Expectations

Podcast Episode

Soda Data

Podcast Episode

Google DataStore Unfix.work Activity Schema

Podcast Episode

Data Vault

Podcast Episode

Star Schema Lean Methodology Scrum Kanban

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

Sponsored By: Atlan:

Have you ever woken up to a crisis because a number on a dashboard is broken and no one knows why? Or sent out frustrating slack messages trying to find the right data set? Or tried to understand what a column name means?

Our friends at Atlan started out as a data team themselves and faced all this collaboration chaos themselves, and started building Atlan as an internal tool for themselves. 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 and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription.Prefect:

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…

Summary Data mesh is a frequent topic of conversation in the data community, with many debates about how and when to employ this architectural pattern. The team at AgileLab have first-hand experience helping large enterprise organizations evaluate and implement their own data mesh strategies. In this episode Paolo Platter shares the lessons they have learned in that process, the Data Mesh Boost platform that they have built to reduce some of the boilerplate required to make it successful, and some of the considerations to make when deciding if a data mesh is the right choice for you.

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. The only thing worse than having bad data is not knowing that you have it. With Bigeye’s data observability platform, if there is an issue with your data or data pipelines you’ll know right away and can get it fixed before the business is impacted. Bigeye let’s data teams measure, improve, and communicate the quality of your data to company stakeholders. With complete API access, a user-friendly interface, and automated yet flexible alerting, you’ve got everything you need to establish and maintain trust in your data. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/bigeye today to sign up and start trusting your analyses. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Paolo Platter about Agile Lab’s lessons learned through helping large enterprises establish their own data mesh

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you share your experiences working with data mesh implementations? What were the stated goals of project engagements that led to data mesh implementations? What are some examples of projects where you explored data mesh as an option and decided that it was a poor fit? What are some of the technical and process investments that are necessary to support a mesh str

Summary Data is a critical element to every role in an organization, which is also what makes managing it so challenging. With so many different opinions about which pieces of information are most important, how it needs to be accessed, and what to do with it, many data projects are doomed to failure. In this episode Chris Bergh explains how taking an agile approach to delivering value can drive down the complexity that grows out of the varied needs of the business. Building a DataOps workflow that incorporates fast delivery of well defined projects, continuous testing, and open lines of communication is a proven path to success.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! If DataOps sounds like the perfect antidote to your pipeline woes, DataKitchen is here to help. DataKitchen’s DataOps Platform automates and coordinates all the people, tools, and environments in your entire data analytics organization – everything from orchestration, testing and monitoring to development and deployment. In no time, you’ll reclaim control of your data pipelines so you can start delivering business value instantly, without errors. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datakitchen today to learn more and thank them for supporting the show! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m welcoming back Chris Bergh to talk about ways that DataOps principles can help to reduce organizational complexity

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? How are typical data and analytic teams organized? What are their roles and structure? Can you start by giving an outline of the ways that complexity can manifest in a data organization?

What are some of the contributing factors that generate this complexity? How does the size or scale of an organization and their data needs impact the segmentation of responsibilities and roles?

How does this organizational complexity play out within a single team? For example between data engineers, data scientists, and production/operations? How do you approach the definition of useful interfaces between different roles or groups within an organization?

What are your thoughts on the relationship between the multivariate complexities of data and analytics workflows and the software trend toward microservices as a means of addressing the challenges of organizational communication patterns in the software lifecycle?

How does this organizational complexity play out between multiple teams? For example between centralized data team and line of business self service teams? Isn’t organizational complexity just ‘the way it is’? Is there any how in getting out of meetings and inter team conflict? What are some of the technical elements that are most impactful in reducing the time to delivery for different roles? What are some strategies that you have found to be useful for maintaining a connection to the business need throughout the different stages of the data lifecycle? What are some of the signs or symptoms of problematic complexity that individuals and organizations should keep an eye out for? What role can automated testing play in improving this process? How do the current set of tools contribute to the fragmentation of data wor

Summary Designing the structure for your data warehouse is a complex and challenging process. As businesses deal with a growing number of sources and types of information that they need to integrate, they need a data modeling strategy that provides them with flexibility and speed. Data Vault is an approach that allows for evolving a data model in place without requiring destructive transformations and massive up front design to answer valuable questions. In this episode Kent Graziano shares his journey with data vault, explains how it allows for an agile approach to data warehousing, and explains the core principles of how to use it. If you’re struggling with unwieldy dimensional models, slow moving projects, or challenges integrating new data sources then listen in on this conversation and then give data vault a try for yourself.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Setting up and managing a data warehouse for your business analytics is a huge task. Integrating real-time data makes it even more challenging, but the insights you obtain can make or break your business growth. You deserve a data warehouse engine that outperforms the demands of your customers and simplifies your operations at a fraction of the time and cost that you might expect. You deserve Clickhouse, the open source analytical database that deploys and scales wherever and whenever you want it to and turns data into actionable insights. And Altinity, the leading software and service provider for Clickhouse, is on a mission to help data engineers and DevOps managers tame their operational analytics. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/altinity for a free consultation to find out how they can help you today. You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Corinium Global Intelligence, ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the Software Architecture Conference in NYC, Strata Data in San Jose, and PyCon US in Pittsburgh. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kent Graziano about data vault modeling and the role that it plays in the current data landscape

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of what data vault modeling is and how it differs from other approaches such as third normal form or the star/snowflake schema?

What is the history of this approach and what limitations of alternate styles of modeling is it attempting to overcome? How did you first encounter this approach to data modeling and what is your motivation for dedicating so much time and energy to promoting it?

What are some of the primary challenges associated with data modeling that contribute to the long lead times for data requests or o

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

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Managing and auditing access to your servers and databases is a problem that grows in difficulty alongside the growth of your teams. If you are tired of wasting your time cobbling together scripts and workarounds to give your developers, data scientists, and managers the permissions that they need then it’s time to talk to our friends at strongDM. They have built an easy to use platform that lets you leverage your company’s single sign on for your data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/strongdm today to find out how you can simplify your systems. "There aren’t enough data conferences out there that focus on the community, so that’s why these folks built a better one": Data Council is the premier community powered data platforms & engineering event for software engineers, data engineers, machine learning experts, deep learning researchers & artificial intelligence buffs who want to discover tools & insights to build new products. This year they will host over 50 speakers and 500 attendees (yeah that’s one of the best "Attendee:Speaker" ratios out there) in San Francisco on April 17-18th and are offering a $200 discount to listeners of the Data Engineering Podcast. Use code: DEP-200 at checkout You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Chris Bergh about the current state of DataOps and why it’s more than just DevOps for data

Interview

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

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

How has the conversat

Summary

With the proliferation of data sources to give a more comprehensive view of the information critical to your business it is even more important to have a canonical view of the entities that you care about. Is customer number 342 in your ERP the same as Bob Smith on Twitter? Using master data management to build a data catalog helps you answer these questions reliably and simplify the process of building your business intelligence reports. In this episode the head of product at Tamr, Mark Marinelli, discusses the challenges of building a master data set, why you should have one, and some of the techniques that modern platforms and systems provide for maintaining it.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. You work hard to make sure that your data is reliable and accurate, but can you say the same about the deployment of your machine learning models? The Skafos platform from Metis Machine was built to give your data scientists the end-to-end support that they need throughout the machine learning lifecycle. Skafos maximizes interoperability with your existing tools and platforms, and offers real-time insights and the ability to be up and running with cloud-based production scale infrastructure instantaneously. Request a demo at dataengineeringpodcast.com/metis-machine to learn more about how Metis Machine is operationalizing data science. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Mark Marinelli about data mastering for modern platforms

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by establishing a definition of data mastering that we can work from?

How does the master data set get used within the overall analytical and processing systems of an organization?

What is the traditional workflow for creating a master data set?

What has changed in the current landscape of businesses and technology platforms that makes that approach impractical? What are the steps that an organization can take to evolve toward an agile approach to data mastering?

At what scale of company or project does it makes sense to start building a master data set? What are the limitations of using ML/AI to merge data sets? What are the limitations of a golden master data set in practice?

Are there particular formats of data or types of entities that pose a greater challenge when creating a canonical format for them? Are there specific problem domains that are more likely to benefit from a master data set?

Once a golden master has been established, how are changes to that information handled in practice? (e.g. versioning of the data) What storage mechanisms are typically used for managing a master data set?

Are there particular security, auditing, or access concerns that engineers should be considering when managing their golden master that goes beyond the rest of their data infrastructure? How do you manage latency issues when trying to reference the same entities from multiple disparate systems?

What have you found to be the most common stumbling blocks for a group that is implementing a master data platform?

What suggestions do you have to help prevent such a project from being derailed?

What resources do you recommend for someone looking to learn more about the theoretical and practical aspects of

Summary

Data integration and routing is a constantly evolving problem and one that is fraught with edge cases and complicated requirements. The Apache NiFi project models this problem as a collection of data flows that are created through a self-service graphical interface. This framework provides a flexible platform for building a wide variety of integrations that can be managed and scaled easily to fit your particular needs. In this episode project members Kevin Doran and Andy LoPresto discuss the ways that NiFi can be used, how to start using it in your environment, and plans for future development. They also explained how it fits in the broad landscape of data tools, the interesting and challenging aspects of the project, and how to build new extensions.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. Are you struggling to keep up with customer request and letting errors slip into production? Want to try some of the innovative ideas in this podcast but don’t have time? DataKitchen’s DataOps software allows your team to quickly iterate and deploy pipelines of code, models, and data sets while improving quality. Unlike a patchwork of manual operations, DataKitchen makes your team shine by providing an end to end DataOps solution with minimal programming that uses the tools you love. Join the DataOps movement and sign up for the newsletter at datakitchen.io/de today. After that learn more about why you should be doing DataOps by listening to the Head Chef in the Data Kitchen at dataengineeringpodcast.com/datakitchen Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kevin Doran and Andy LoPresto about Apache NiFi

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what NiFi is? What is the motivation for building a GUI as the primary interface for the tool when the current trend is to represent everything as code? How did you get involved with the project?

Where does it sit in the broader landscape of data tools?

Does the data that is processed by NiFi flow through the servers that it is running on (á la Spark/Flink/Kafka), or does it orchestrate actions on other systems (á la Airflow/Oozie)?

How do you manage versioning and backup of data flows, as well as promoting them between environments?

One of the advertised features is tracking provenance for data flows that are managed by NiFi. How is that data collected and managed?

What types of reporting are available across this information?

What are some of the use cases or requirements that lend themselves well to being solved by NiFi?

When is NiFi the wrong choice?

What is involved in deploying and scaling a NiFi installation?

What are some of the system/network parameters that should be considered? What are the scaling limitations?

What have you found to be some of the most interesting, unexpected, and/or challenging aspects of building and maintaining the NiFi project and community? What do you have planned for the future of NiFi?

Contact Info

Kevin Doran

@kevdoran on Twitter Email

Andy LoPresto

@yolopey on Twitter Email

Parting Question

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

Links

NiFi HortonWorks DataFlow HortonWorks Apache Software Foundation Apple CSV XML JSON Perl Python Internet Scale Asset Management Documentum DataFlow NSA (National Security Agency) 24 (TV Show) Technology Transfer Program Agile Software Development Waterfall Spark Flink Kafka Oozie Luigi Airflow FluentD ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) MiNiFi Java C++ Provenance Kubernetes Apache Atlas Data Governance Kibana K-Nearest Neighbors DevOps DSL (Domain Specific Language) NiFi Registry Artifact Repository Nexus NiFi CLI Maven Archetype IoT Docker Backpressure NiFi Wiki TLS (Transport Layer Security) Mozilla TLS Observatory NiFi Flow Design System Data Lineage GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

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

Summary

Managing an analytics project can be difficult due to the number of systems involved and the need to ensure that new information can be delivered quickly and reliably. That challenge can be met by adopting practices and principles from lean manufacturing and agile software development, and the cross-functional collaboration, feedback loops, and focus on automation in the DevOps movement. In this episode Christopher Bergh discusses ways that you can start adding reliability and speed to your workflow to deliver results with confidence and consistency.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Christopher Bergh about DataKitchen and the rise of DataOps

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? How do you define DataOps?

How does it compare to the practices encouraged by the DevOps movement? How does it relate to or influence the role of a data engineer?

How does a DataOps oriented workflow differ from other existing approaches for building data platforms? One of the aspects of DataOps that you call out is the practice of providing multiple environments to provide a platform for testing the various aspects of the analytics workflow in a non-production context. What are some of the techniques that are available for managing data in appropriate volumes across those deployments? The practice of testing logic as code is fairly well understood and has a large set of existing tools. What have you found to be some of the most effective methods for testing data as it flows through a system? One of the practices of DevOps is to create feedback loops that can be used to ensure that business needs are being met. What are the metrics that you track in your platform to define the value that is being created and how the various steps in the workflow are proceeding toward that goal?

In order to keep feedback loops fast it is necessary for tests to run quickly. How do you balance the need for larger quantities of data to be used for verifying scalability/performance against optimizing for cost and speed in non-production environments?

How does the DataKitchen platform simplify the process of operationalizing a data analytics workflow? As the need for rapid iteration and deployment of systems to capture, store, process, and analyze data becomes more prevalent how do you foresee that feeding back into the ways that the landscape of data tools are designed and developed?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @ChrisBergh on Twitter Email

Parting Question

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

Links

DataOps Manifesto DataKitchen 2017: The Year Of DataOps Air Traffic Control Chief Data Officer (CDO) Gartner W. Edwards Deming DevOps Total Quality Management (TQM) Informatica Talend Agile Development Cattle Not Pets IDE (Integrated Devel

Summary

As software lifecycles move faster, the database needs to be able to keep up. Practices such as version controlled migration scripts and iterative schema evolution provide the necessary mechanisms to ensure that your data layer is as agile as your application. Pramod Sadalage saw the need for these capabilities during the early days of the introduction of modern development practices and co-authored a book to codify a large number of patterns to aid practitioners, and in this episode he reflects on the current state of affairs and how things have changed over the past 12 years.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your data pipelines or trying out the tools you hear about on the show. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. You can help support the show by checking out the Patreon page which is linked from the site. To help other people find the show you can leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, and tell your friends and co-workers Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Pramod Sadalage about refactoring databases and integrating database design into an iterative development workflow

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? You first co-authored Refactoring Databases in 2006. What was the state of software and database system development at the time and why did you find it necessary to write a book on this subject? What are the characteristics of a database that make them more difficult to manage in an iterative context? How does the practice of refactoring in the context of a database compare to that of software? How has the prevalence of data abstractions such as ORMs or ODMs impacted the practice of schema design and evolution? Is there a difference in strategy when refactoring the data layer of a system when using a non-relational storage system? How has the DevOps movement and the increased focus on automation affected the state of the art in database versioning and evolution? What have you found to be the most problematic aspects of databases when trying to evolve the functionality of a system? Looking back over the past 12 years, what has changed in the areas of database design and evolution?

How has the landscape of tooling for managing and applying database versioning changed since you first wrote Refactoring Databases? What do you see as the biggest challenges facing us over the next few years?

Contact Info

Website pramodsadalage on GitHub @pramodsadalage on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

Database Refactoring

Website Book

Thoughtworks Martin Fowler Agile Software Development XP (Extreme Programming) Continuous Integration

The Book Wikipedia

Test First Development DDL (Data Definition Language) DML (Data Modification Language) DevOps Flyway Liquibase DBMaintain Hibernate SQLAlchemy ORM (Object Relational Mapper) ODM (Object Document Mapper) NoSQL Document Database MongoDB OrientDB CouchBase CassandraDB Neo4j ArangoDB Unit Testing Integration Testing OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) Data Warehouse Docker QA==Quality Assurance HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) Polyglot Persistence Toplink Java ORM Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord Gem

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