Summary Managing a data warehouse can be challenging, especially when trying to maintain a common set of patterns. Dataform is a platform that helps you apply engineering principles to your data transformations and table definitions, including unit testing SQL scripts, defining repeatable pipelines, and adding metadata to your warehouse to improve your team’s communication. In this episode CTO and co-founder of Dataform Lewis Hemens joins the show to explain his motivation for creating the platform and company, how it works under the covers, and how you can start using it today to get your data warehouse under control.

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! This week’s episode is also sponsored by Datacoral. They provide an AWS-native, serverless, data infrastructure that installs in your VPC. Datacoral helps data engineers build and manage the flow of data pipelines without having to manage any infrastructure. Datacoral’s customers report that their data engineers are able to spend 80% of their work time invested in data transformations, rather than pipeline maintenance. Raghu Murthy, founder and CEO of Datacoral built data infrastructures at Yahoo! and Facebook, scaling from mere terabytes to petabytes of analytic data. He started Datacoral with the goal to make SQL the universal data programming language. Visit Datacoral.com today to find out more. Are you working on data, analytics, or AI using platforms such as Presto, Spark, or Tensorflow? Check out the Data Orchestration Summit on November 7 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This one day conference is focused on the key data engineering challenges and solutions around building analytics and AI platforms. Attendees will hear from companies including Walmart, Netflix, Google, and DBS Bank on how they leveraged technologies such as Alluxio, Presto, Spark, Tensorflow, and you will also hear from creators of open source projects including Alluxio, Presto, Airflow, Iceberg, and more! Use discount code PODCAST for 25% off of your ticket, and the first five people to register get free tickets! Register now as early bird tickets are ending this week! Attendees will takeaway learnings, swag, a free voucher to visit the museum, and a chance to win the latest ipad Pro! 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, Corinium Global Intelligence, Alluxio, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum, the Data Orchestration Summit, and Data Council in NYC. 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 Lewis Hemens about DataForm, a platform that helps analy

Leverage machine and deep learning models to build applications on real-time data using PySpark. This book is perfect for those who want to learn to use this language to perform exploratory data analysis and solve an array of business challenges. You'll start by reviewing PySpark fundamentals, such as Spark’s core architecture, and see how to use PySpark for big data processing like data ingestion, cleaning, and transformations techniques. This is followed by building workflows for analyzing streaming data using PySpark and a comparison of various streaming platforms. You'll then see how to schedule different spark jobs using Airflow with PySpark and book examine tuning machine and deep learning models for real-time predictions. This book concludes with a discussion on graph frames and performing network analysis using graph algorithms in PySpark. All the code presented in the book will be available in Python scripts on Github. What You'll Learn Develop pipelines for streaming data processing using PySpark Build Machine Learning & Deep Learning models using PySpark latest offerings Use graph analytics using PySpark Create Sequence Embeddings from Text data Who This Book is For Data Scientists, machine learning and deep learning engineers who want to learn and use PySpark for real time analysis on streaming data.

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

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management.For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Coming up this fall is the combined events of Graphorum and the Data Architecture Summit. The agendas have been announced and super early bird registration for up to $300 off is available until July 26th, with early bird pricing for up to $200 off through August 30th. Use the code BNLLC to get an additional 10% off any pass when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Jeremiah Lowin about Prefect, a workflow platform for data engineering

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Info

LinkedIn @jlowin on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

Prefect Airflow Dask

Podcast Episode

Prefect Blog PyData Presentation Tensorflow Workflow Engine

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary In recent years the traditional approach to building data warehouses has shifted from transforming records before loading, to transforming them afterwards. As a result, the tooling for those transformations needs to be reimagined. The data build tool (dbt) is designed to bring battle tested engineering practices to your analytics pipelines. By providing an opinionated set of best practices it simplifies collaboration and boosts confidence in your data teams. In this episode Drew Banin, creator of dbt, explains how it got started, how it is designed, and how you can start using it today to create reliable and well-tested reports in your favorite data warehouse.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Understanding how your customers are using your product is critical for businesses of any size. To make it easier for startups to focus on delivering useful features Segment offers a flexible and reliable data infrastructure for your customer analytics and custom events. You only need to maintain one integration to instrument your code and get a future-proof way to send data to over 250 services with the flip of a switch. Not only does it free up your engineers’ time, it lets your business users decide what data they want where. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/segmentio today to sign up for their startup plan and get $25,000 in Segment credits and $1 million in free software from marketing and analytics companies like AWS, Google, and Intercom. On top of that you’ll get access to Analytics Academy for the educational resources you need to become an expert in data analytics for measuring product-market fit. You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Drew Banin about DBT, the Data Build Tool, a toolkit for building analytics the way that developers build applications

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what DBT is and your motivation for creating it? Where does it fit in the overall landscape of data tools and the lifecycle of data in an analytics pipeline? Can you talk through the workflow for someone using DBT? One of the useful features of DBT for stability of analytics is the ability to write and execute tests. Can you explain how those are implemented? The packaging capabilities are beneficial for enabling collaboration. Can you talk through how the packaging system is implemented?

Are these packages driven by Fishtown Analytics or the dbt community?

What are the limitations of modeling everything as a SELECT statement? Making SQL code reusable is notoriously difficult. How does the Jinja templating of DBT address this issue and what are the shortcomings?

What are your thoughts on higher level approaches to SQL that compile down to the specific statements?

Can you explain how DBT is implemented and how the design has evolved since you first began working on it? What are some of the features of DBT that are often overlooked which you find particularly useful? What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/innovative ways that you have seen DBT used? What are the additional features that the commercial version of DBT provides? What are some of the most useful or challenging lessons that you have learned in the process of building and maintaining DBT? When is it the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of DBT?

Contact Info

Email @drebanin on Twitter drebanin on GitHub

Parting Question

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

Links

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

Podcast Episode

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

Podcast Interview

Presto DB

Podcast Interview

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

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

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

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media. Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kevin Dewalt about his experiences at Prolego, building machine learning projects for Fortune 500 companies

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Info

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

Parting Question

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

Links

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

Podcast Interview

Joel Grus

JupyterCon Presentation Data Science From Scratch

Expensify Airflow

James Meickle Interview

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

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

Business intelligence is a necessity for any organization that wants to be able to make informed decisions based on the data that they collect. Unfortunately, it is common for different portions of the business to build their reports with different assumptions, leading to conflicting views and poor choices. Looker is a modern tool for building and sharing reports that makes it easy to get everyone on the same page. In this episode Daniel Mintz explains how the product is architected, the features that make it easy for any business user to access and explore their reports, and how you can use it for your organization today.

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. 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 Daniel Mintz about Looker, a a modern data platform that can serve the data needs of an entire company

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what Looker is and the problem that it is aiming to solve?

How do you define business intelligence?

How is Looker unique from other approaches to business intelligence in the enterprise?

How does it compare to open source platforms for BI?

Can you describe the technical infrastructure that supports Looker? Given that you are connecting to the customer’s data store, how do you ensure sufficient security? For someone who is using Looker, what does their workflow look like?

How does that change for different user roles (e.g. data engineer vs sales management)

What are the scaling factors for Looker, both in terms of volume of data for reporting from, and for user concurrency? What are the most challenging aspects of building a business intelligence tool and company in the modern data ecosystem?

What are the portions of the Looker architecture that you would do differently if you were to start over today?

What are some of the most interesting or unusual uses of Looker that you have seen? What is in store for the future of Looker?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Looker Upworthy MoveOn.org LookML SQL Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Linux Hadoop BigQuery Snowflake Redshift DB2 PostGres ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) Airflow Luigi NiFi Data Curation Episode Presto Hive Athena DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) Looker Action Hub Salesforce Marketo Twilio Netscape Navigator Dynamic Pricing Survival Analysis DevOps BigQuery ML Snowflake Data Sharehouse

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

Summary

The theory behind how a tool is supposed to work and the realities of putting it into practice are often at odds with each other. Learning the pitfalls and best practices from someone who has gained that knowledge the hard way can save you from wasted time and frustration. In this episode James Meickle discusses his recent experience building a new installation of Airflow. He points out the strengths, design flaws, and areas of improvement for the framework. He also describes the design patterns and workflows that his team has built to allow them to use Airflow as the basis of their data science platform.

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. 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 James Meickle about his experiences building a new Airflow installation

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What was your initial project requirement?

What tooling did you consider in addition to Airflow? What aspects of the Airflow platform led you to choose it as your implementation target?

Can you describe your current deployment architecture?

How many engineers are involved in writing tasks for your Airflow installation?

What resources were the most helpful while learning about Airflow design patterns?

How have you architected your DAGs for deployment and extensibility?

What kinds of tests and automation have you put in place to support the ongoing stability of your deployment? What are some of the dead-ends or other pitfalls that you encountered during the course of this project? What aspects of Airflow have you found to be lacking that you would like to see improved? What did you wish someone had told you before you started work on your Airflow installation?

If you were to start over would you make the same choice? If Airflow wasn’t available what would be your second choice?

What are your next steps for improvements and fixes?

Contact Info

@eronarn on Twitter Website eronarn on GitHub

Parting Question

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

Links

Quantopian Harvard Brain Science Initiative DevOps Days Boston Google Maps API Cron ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Azkaban Luigi AWS Glue Airflow Pachyderm

Podcast Interview

AirBnB Python YAML Ansible REST (Representational State Transfer) SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) Maxime Beauchemin

Medium Blog

Celery Dask

Podcast Interview

PostgreSQL

Podcast Interview

Redis Cloudformation Jupyter Notebook Qubole Astronomer

Podcast Interview

Gunicorn Kubernetes Airflow Improvement Proposals Python Enhancement Proposals (PEP)

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

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

Collaboration, distribution, and installation of software projects is largely a solved problem, but the same cannot be said of data. Every data team has a bespoke means of sharing data sets, versioning them, tracking related metadata and changes, and publishing them for use in the software systems that rely on them. The CEO and founder of Quilt Data, Kevin Moore, was sufficiently frustrated by this problem to create a platform that attempts to be the means by which data can be as collaborative and easy to work with as GitHub and your favorite programming language. In this episode he explains how the project came to be, how it works, and the many ways that you can start using it today.

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 Moore about Quilt Data, a platform and tooling for packaging, distributing, and versioning data

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is the intended use case for Quilt and how did the project get started? Can you step through a typical workflow of someone using Quilt?

How does that change as you go from a single user to a team of data engineers and data scientists?

Can you describe the elements of what a data package consists of?

What was your criteria for the file formats that you chose?

How is Quilt architected and what have been the most significant changes or evolutions since you first started? How is the data registry implemented?

What are the limitations or edge cases that you have run into? What optimizations have you made to accelerate synchronization of the data to and from the repository?

What are the limitations in terms of data volume, format, or usage? What is your goal with the business that you have built around the project? What are your plans for the future of Quilt?

Contact Info

Email LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Quilt Data GitHub Jobs Reproducible Data Dependencies in Jupyter Reproducible Machine Learning with Jupyter and Quilt Allen Institute: Programmatic Data Access with Quilt Quilt Example: MissingNo Oracle Pandas Jupyter Ycombinator Data.World

Podcast Episode with CTO Bryon Jacob

Kaggle Parquet HDF5 Arrow PySpark Excel Scala Binder Merkle Tree Allen Institute for Cell Science Flask PostGreSQL Docker Airflow Quilt Teams Hive Hive Metastore PrestoDB

Podcast Episode

Netflix Iceberg Kubernetes Helm

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

Summary

The information about how data is acquired and processed is often as important as the data itself. For this reason metadata management systems are built to track the journey of your business data to aid in analysis, presentation, and compliance. These systems are frequently cumbersome and difficult to maintain, so Octopai was founded to alleviate that burden. In this episode Amnon Drori, CEO and co-founder of Octopai, discusses the business problems he witnessed that led him to starting the company, how their systems are able to provide valuable tools and insights, and the direction that their product will be taking in the future.

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 200Gbit 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 Amnon Drori about OctopAI and the benefits of metadata management

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is OctopAI and what was your motivation for founding it? What are some of the types of information that you classify and collect as metadata? Can you talk through the architecture of your platform? What are some of the challenges that are typically faced by metadata management systems? What is involved in deploying your metadata collection agents? Once the metadata has been collected what are some of the ways in which it can be used? What mechanisms do you use to ensure that customer data is segregated?

How do you identify and handle sensitive information during the collection step?

What are some of the most challenging aspects of your technical and business platforms that you have faced? What are some of the plans that you have for OctopAI going forward?

Contact Info

Amnon

LinkedIn @octopai_amnon on Twitter

OctopAI

@OctopaiBI on Twitter Website

Parting Question

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

Links

OctopAI Metadata Metadata Management Data Integrity CRM (Customer Relationship Management) ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Business Intelligence ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Informatica SAP Data Governance SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) Vertica Airflow Luigi Oozie GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation) Root Cause Analysis

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

Building and maintaining data pipelines and workflows can be very complicated, difficult to manage and error prone. AirBnb created and open-sourced Apache Airflow in 2015 to solve a lot of the problems. If you have ever needed to automate, schedule, handle errors or send out alerts for your data workflows then Airflow will be the perfect new tool in your data toolbox.

Summary

Building a data pipeline that is reliable and flexible is a difficult task, especially when you have a small team. Astronomer is a platform that lets you skip straight to processing your valuable business data. Ry Walker, the CEO of Astronomer, explains how the company got started, how the platform works, and their commitment to open source.

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 www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss 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 This is your host Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ry Walker, CEO of Astronomer, the platform for data engineering.

Interview

Introduction How did you first get involved in the area of data management? What is Astronomer and how did it get started? Regulatory challenges of processing other people’s data What does your data pipelining architecture look like? What are the most challenging aspects of building a general purpose data management environment? What are some of the most significant sources of technical debt in your platform? Can you share some of the failures that you have encountered while architecting or building your platform and company and how you overcame them? There are certain areas of the overall data engineering workflow that are well defined and have numerous tools to choose from. What are some of the unsolved problems in data management? What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses of your platform that you are aware of?

Contact Information

Email @rywalker on Twitter

Links

Astronomer Kiss Metrics Segment Marketing tools chart Clickstream HIPAA FERPA PCI Mesos Mesos DC/OS Airflow SSIS Marathon Prometheus Grafana Terraform Kafka Spark ELK Stack React GraphQL PostGreSQL MongoDB Ceph Druid Aries Vault Adapter Pattern Docker Kinesis API Gateway Kong AWS Lambda Flink Redshift NOAA Informatica SnapLogic Meteor

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

Data science teams looking to turn research into useful analytics applications require not only the right tools, but also the right approach if they’re to succeed. With the revised second edition of this hands-on guide, up-and-coming data scientists will learn how to use the Agile Data Science development methodology to build data applications with Python, Apache Spark, Kafka, and other tools. Author Russell Jurney demonstrates how to compose a data platform for building, deploying, and refining analytics applications with Apache Kafka, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, d3.js, scikit-learn, and Apache Airflow. You’ll learn an iterative approach that lets you quickly change the kind of analysis you’re doing, depending on what the data is telling you. Publish data science work as a web application, and affect meaningful change in your organization. Build value from your data in a series of agile sprints, using the data-value pyramid Extract features for statistical models from a single dataset Visualize data with charts, and expose different aspects through interactive reports Use historical data to predict the future via classification and regression Translate predictions into actions Get feedback from users after each sprint to keep your project on track

Summary

What exactly is data engineering? How has it evolved in recent years and where is it going? How do you get started in the field? In this episode, Maxime Beauchemin joins me to discuss these questions and more.

Transcript provided by CastSource

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure 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 Maxime Beauchemin

Questions

Introduction How did you get involved in the field of data engineering? How do you define data engineering and how has that changed in recent years? Do you think that the DevOps movement over the past few years has had any impact on the discipline of data engineering? If so, what kinds of cross-over have you seen? For someone who wants to get started in the field of data engineering what are some of the necessary skills? What do you see as the biggest challenges facing data engineers currently? At what scale does it become necessary to differentiate between someone who does data engineering vs data infrastructure and what are the differences in terms of skill set and problem domain? How much analytical knowledge is necessary for a typical data engineer? What are some of the most important considerations when establishing new data sources to ensure that the resulting information is of sufficient quality? You have commented on the fact that data engineering borrows a number of elements from software engineering. Where does the concept of unit testing fit in data management and what are some of the most effective patterns for implementing that practice? How has the work done by data engineers and managers of data infrastructure bled back into mainstream software and systems engineering in terms of tools and best practices? How do you see the role of data engineers evolving in the next few years?

Keep In Touch

@mistercrunch on Twitter mistercrunch on GitHub Medium

Links

Datadog Airflow The Rise of the Data Engineer Druid.io Luigi Apache Beam Samza Hive Data Modeling

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

Summary

There is a vast constellation of tools and platforms for processing and analyzing your data. In this episode Matthew Rocklin talks about how Dask fills the gap between a task oriented workflow tool and an in memory processing framework, and how it brings the power of Python to bear on the problem of big data.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure 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 Matthew Rocklin about Dask and the Blaze ecosystem.

Interview with Matthew Rocklin

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data engineering? Dask began its life as part of the Blaze project. Can you start by describing what Dask is and how it originated? There are a vast number of tools in the field of data analytics. What are some of the specific use cases that Dask was built for that weren’t able to be solved by the existing options? One of the compelling features of Dask is the fact that it is a Python library that allows for distributed computation at a scale that has largely been the exclusive domain of tools in the Hadoop ecosystem. Why do you think that the JVM has been the reigning platform in the data analytics space for so long? Do you consider Dask, along with the larger Blaze ecosystem, to be a competitor to the Hadoop ecosystem, either now or in the future? Are you seeing many Hadoop or Spark solutions being migrated to Dask? If so, what are the common reasons? There is a strong focus for using Dask as a tool for interactive exploration of data. How does it compare to something like Apache Drill? For anyone looking to integrate Dask into an existing code base that is already using NumPy or Pandas, what does that process look like? How do the task graph capabilities compare to something like Airflow or Luigi? Looking through the documentation for the graph specification in Dask, it appears that there is the potential to introduce cycles or other bugs into a large or complex task chain. Is there any built-in tooling to check for that before submitting the graph for execution? What are some of the most interesting or unexpected projects that you have seen Dask used for? What do you perceive as being the most relevant aspects of Dask for data engineering/data infrastructure practitioners, as compared to the end users of the systems that they support? What are some of the most significant problems that you have been faced with, and which still need to be overcome in the Dask project? I know that the work on Dask is largely performed under the umbrella of PyData and sponsored by Continuum Analytics. What are your thoughts on the financial landscape for open source data analytics and distributed computation frameworks as compared to the broader world of open source projects?

Keep in touch

@mrocklin on Twitter mrocklin on GitHub

Links

http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2016/09/22/cluster-deployments?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss https://opendatascience.com/blog/dask-for-institutions/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss Continuum Analytics 2sigma X-Array Tornado

Website Podcast Interview

Airflow Luigi Mesos Kubernetes Spark Dryad Yarn Read The Docs XData

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

Summary

Do you wish that you could track the changes in your data the same way that you track the changes in your code? Pachyderm is a platform for building a data lake with a versioned file system. It also lets you use whatever languages you want to run your analysis with its container based task graph. This week Daniel Whitenack shares the story of how the project got started, how it works under the covers, and how you can get started using it today!

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure 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 Daniel Whitenack about Pachyderm, a modern container based system for building and analyzing a versioned data lake.

Interview with Daniel Whitenack

Introduction How did you get started in the data engineering space? What is pachyderm and what problem were you trying to solve when the project was started? Where does the name come from? What are some of the competing projects in the space and what features does Pachyderm offer that would convince someone to choose it over the other options? Because of the fact that the analysis code and the data that it acts on are all versioned together it allows for tracking the provenance of the end result. Why is this such an important capability in the context of data engineering and analytics? What does Pachyderm use for the distribution and scaling mechanism of the file system? Given that you can version your data and track all of the modifications made to it in a manner that allows for traversal of those changesets, how much additional storage is necessary over and above the original capacity needed for the raw data? For a typical use of Pachyderm would someone keep all of the revisions in perpetuity or are the changesets primarily just useful in the context of an analysis workflow? Given that the state of the data is calculated by applying the diffs in sequence what impact does that have on processing speed and what are some of the ways of mitigating that? Another compelling feature of Pachyderm is the fact that it natively supports the use of any language for interacting with your data. Why is this such an important capability and why is it more difficult with alternative solutions?

How did you implement this feature so that it would be maintainable and easy to implement for end users?

Given that the intent of using containers is for encapsulating the analysis code from experimentation through to production, it seems that there is the potential for the implementations to run into problems as they scale. What are some things that users should be aware of to help mitigate this? The data pipeline and dependency graph tooling is a useful addition to the combination of file system and processing interface. Does that preclude any requirement for external tools such as Luigi or Airflow? I see that the docs mention using the map reduce pattern for analyzing the data in Pachyderm. Does it support other approaches such as streaming or tools like Apache Drill? What are some of the most interesting deployments and uses of Pachyderm that you have seen? What are some of the areas that you are looking for help from the community and are there any particular issues that the listeners can check out to get started with the project?

Keep in touch

Daniel

Twitter – @dwhitena

Pachyderm

Website

Free Weekend Project

GopherNotes

Links

AirBnB RethinkDB Flocker Infinite Project Git LFS Luigi Airflow Kafka Kubernetes Rkt SciKit Learn Docker Minikube General Fusion

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Or