Summary Building and maintaining reliable data assets is the prime directive for data engineers. While it is easy to say, it is endlessly complex to implement, requiring data professionals to be experts in a wide range of disparate topics while designing and implementing complex topologies of information workflows. In order to make this a tractable problem it is essential that engineers embrace automation at every opportunity. In this episode Chris Riccomini shares his experiences building and scaling data operations at WePay and LinkedIn, as well as the lessons he has learned working with other teams as they automated their own systems.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Chris Riccomini about building awareness of data usage into CI/CD pipelines for application development

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What are the pieces of data platforms and processing that have been most difficult to scale in an organizational sense? What are the opportunities for automation to alleviate some of the toil that data and analytics engineers get caught up in? The application delivery ecosystem has been going through ongoing transformation in the form of CI/CD, infrastructure as code, etc. What are the parallels in the data ecosystem that are still nascent? What are the principles that still need to be translated for data practitioners? Which are subject to impedance mismatch and may never make sense to translate? As someone with a software engineering background and extensive e

Summary The perennial challenge of data engineers is ensuring that information is integrated reliably. While it is straightforward to know whether a synchronization process succeeded, it is not always clear whether every record was copied correctly. In order to quickly identify if and how two data systems are out of sync Gleb Mezhanskiy and Simon Eskildsen partnered to create the open source data-diff utility. In this episode they explain how the utility is implemented to run quickly and how you can start using it in your own data workflows to ensure that your data warehouse isn’t missing any records from your source systems.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Random data doesn’t do it — and production data is not safe (or legal) for developers to use. What if you could mimic your entire production database to create a realistic dataset with zero sensitive data? Tonic.ai does exactly that. With Tonic, you can generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production because it’s made from production. Using universal data connectors and a flexible API, Tonic integrates seamlessly into your existing pipelines and allows you to shape and size your data to the scale, realism, and degree of privacy that you need. The platform offers advanced subsetting, secure de-identification, and ML-driven data synthesis to create targeted test data for all of your pre-production environments. Your newly mimicked datasets are safe to share with developers, QA, data scientists—heck, even distributed teams around the world. Shorten development cycles, eliminate the need for cumbersome data pipeline work, and mathematically guarantee the privacy of your data, with Tonic.ai. Data Engineering Podcast listeners can sign up for a free 2-week sandbox account, go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/tonic today to give it a try! Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. 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

Summary The most complicated part of data engineering is the effort involved in making the raw data fit into the narrative of the business. Master Data Management (MDM) is the process of building consensus around what the information actually means in the context of the business and then shaping the data to match those semantics. In this episode Malcolm Hawker shares his years of experience working in this domain to explore the combination of technical and social skills that are necessary to make an MDM project successful both at the outset and over the long term.

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! Random data doesn’t do it — and production data is not safe (or legal) for developers to use. What if you could mimic your entire production database to create a realistic dataset with zero sensitive data? Tonic.ai does exactly that. With Tonic, you can generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production because it’s made from production. Using universal data connectors and a flexible API, Tonic integrates seamlessly into your existing pipelines and allows you to shape and size your data to the scale, realism, and degree of privacy that you need. The platform offers advanced subsetting, secure de-identification, and ML-driven data synthesis to create targeted test data for all of your pre-production environments. Your newly mimicked datasets are safe to share with developers, QA, data scientists—heck, even distributed teams around the world. Shorten development cycles, eliminate the need for cumbersome data pipeline work, and mathematically guarantee the privacy of your data, with Tonic.ai. Data Engineering Podcast listeners can sign up for a free 2-week sandbox account, go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/tonic today to give it a try! RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure

Summary Metadata is the lifeblood of your data platform, providing information about what is happening in your systems. A variety of platforms have been developed to capture and analyze that information to great effect, but they are inherently limited in their utility due to their nature as storage systems. In order to level up their value a new trend of active metadata is being implemented, allowing use cases like keeping BI reports up to date, auto-scaling your warehouses, and automated data governance. In this episode Prukalpa Sankar joins the show to talk about the work she and her team at Atlan are doing to push this capability into the mainstream.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Today’s episode is Sponsored by Prophecy.io – the low-code data engineering platform for the cloud. Prophecy provides an easy-to-use visual interface to design & deploy data pipelines on Apache Spark & Apache Airflow. Now all the data users can use software engineering best practices – git, tests and continuous deployment with a simple to use visual designer. How does it work? – You visually design the pipelines, and Prophecy generates clean Spark code with tests on git; then you visually schedule these pipelines on Airflow. You can observe your pipelines with built in metadata search and column level lineage. Finally, if you have existing workflows in AbInitio, Informatica or other ETL formats that you want to move to the cloud, you can import them automatically into Prophecy making them run productively on Spark. Create your free account today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prophecy. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Prukalpa Sankar about how data platforms can benefit from the idea of "active metadata" and the work that she and her team at Atlan are doing to make it a reality

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what "active metadata" is and how it differs from the current approaches to metadata systems? What are some of the use cases that "active metadata" can enable for data producers and consumers?

What are the points of friction that those users encounter in the current formulation of metadata systems?

Central metadata systems/data catalogs came about as a solution to the challenge of integrating every data tool with every other data tool, giving a single place to integrate. What are the lessons that are being learned from the "modern data stack" that can be applied to centralized metadata? Can you describe the approach that you are taking at Atlan to enable the adoption of "active metadata"?

What are the architectural capabilities that you had to build to power the outbound traffic flows?

How are you addressing the N x M integration problem for pushing metadata into the necessary contexts at Atlan?

What are the interfaces that are necessary for receiving systems to be able to make use of the metadata that is being delivered? How does the type/category of metadata impact the type of integration that is necessary?

What are some of the automation possibilities that metadata activation offers for data teams?

What are the cases where you still need a human in the loop?

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen active metadata capabilities used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on activating metadata for your users? When is an active approach to metadata the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Atlan and active metadata?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @prukalpa 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

Atlan What is Active Metadata? Segment

Podcast Episode

Zapier ArgoCD Kubernetes Wix AWS Lambda Modern Data Culture Blog Post

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary Unstructured data takes many forms in an organization. From a data engineering perspective that often means things like JSON files, audio or video recordings, images, etc. Another category of unstructured data that every business deals with is PDFs, Word documents, workstation backups, and countless other types of information. Aparavi was created to tame the sprawl of information across machines, datacenters, and clouds so that you can reduce the amount of duplicate data and save time and money on managing your data assets. In this episode Rod Christensen shares the story behind Aparavi and how you can use it to cut costs and gain value for the long tail of your unstructured data.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! This episode is brought to you by Acryl Data, the company behind DataHub, the leading developer-friendly data catalog for the modern data stack. Open Source DataHub is running in production at several companies like Peloton, Optum, Udemy, Zynga and others. Acryl Data provides DataHub as an easy to consume SaaS product which has been adopted by several companies. Signup for the SaaS product at dataengineeringpodcast.com/acryl RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Rod Christensen about Aparavi, a platform designed to find and unlock the value of data, no matter where it lives

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Aparavi is and the story behind it? Who are the target customers for Aparavi and how does that inform your product roadmap and messaging? What are some of th

Summary The best way to make sure that you don’t leak sensitive data is to never have it in the first place. The team at Skyflow decided that the second best way is to build a storage system dedicated to securely managing your sensitive information and making it easy to integrate with your applications and data systems. In this episode Sean Falconer explains the idea of a data privacy vault and how this new architectural element can drastically reduce the potential for making a mistake with how you manage regulated or personally identifiable information.

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 all of that information 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 you can take advantage of active metadata and escape the chaos. Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sean Falconer about the idea of a data privacy vault and how the Skyflow team are working to make it turn-key

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Skyflow is and the story behind it? What is a "data privacy vault" and how does it differ from strategies such as privacy engineering or existing data governance patterns? What are the primary use cases and capabilities that you are focused on solving for with Skyflow?

Who is the target customer for Skyflow (e.g. how does it enter an organization)?

How is the Skyflow platform architected?

How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved over time?

Can you describe the process of integrating with Skyflow at the application level? For organizations that are building analytical capabilities on top of the data managed in their applications, what are the interactions with Skyflow at each of the stages in the data lifecycle? One of the perennial problems with distributed systems is the challenge of joining data across machine boundaries. How do you mitigate that problem? On your website there are different "vaults" advertised in the form of healthcare, fintech, and PII. What are the different requirements across each of those problem domains?

What are the commonalities?

As a relatively new company in an emerging product category, what are some of the customer education challenges that you are facing? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Skyflow used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Skyflow? When is Skyflow the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Skyflow?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @seanfalconer on Twitter Website

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 show, Podcast.init to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. 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 iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Skyflow Privacy Engineering Data Governance Homomorphic Encryption Polymorphic Encryption

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary A large fraction of data engineering work involves moving data from one storage location to another in order to support different access and query patterns. Singlestore aims to cut down on the number of database engines that you need to run so that you can reduce the amount of copying that is required. By supporting fast, in-memory row-based queries and columnar on-disk representation, it lets your transactional and analytical workloads run in the same database. In this episode SVP of engineering Shireesh Thota describes the impact on your overall system architecture that Singlestore can have and the benefits of using a cloud-native database engine for your next application.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription So now your modern data stack is set up. How is everyone going to find the data they need, and understand it? Select Star is a data discovery platform that automatically analyzes & documents your data. For every table in Select Star, you can find out where the data originated, which dashboards are built on top of it, who’s using it in the company, and how they’re using it, all the way down to the SQL queries. Best of all, it’s simple to set up, and easy for both engineering and operations teams to use. With Select Star’s data catalog, a single source of truth for your data is built in minutes, even across thousands of datasets. Try it out for free and double the length of your free trial today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/selectstar. You’ll also get a swag package when you continue on a paid plan. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you becom

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

Announcements

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

Interview

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

How has Upsolver changed or evolved since we last spoke?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Info

Ori

LinkedIn

Yoni

yoniiny on GitHub LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Upsolver

Podcast Episode

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

Podcast Episode

BigQuery Presto

Podcast Episode

Apache Kafka Cartesian Product kSQLDB

Podcast Episode

Eventador

Podcast Episode

Materialize

Podcast Episode

Common Table Expressions Lambda Architecture Kappa Architecture Apache Flink

Podcast Episode

Reinforcement Learning Cloudformation GDPR

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

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

The Hadoop platform is purpose built for processing large, slow moving data in long-running batch jobs. As the ecosystem around it has grown, so has the need for fast data analytics on fast moving data. To fill this need the Kudu project was created with a column oriented table format that was tuned for high volumes of writes and rapid query execution across those tables. For a perfect pairing, they made it easy to connect to the Impala SQL engine. In this episode Brock Noland and Jordan Birdsell from PhData explain how Kudu is architected, how it compares to other storage systems in the Hadoop orbit, and how to start integrating it into you analytics pipeline.

Preamble

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 Brock Noland and Jordan Birdsell about Apache Kudu and how it is able to provide fast analytics on fast data in the Hadoop ecosystem

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Kudu is and the motivation for building it?

How does it fit into the Hadoop ecosystem? How does it compare to the work being done on the Iceberg table format?

What are some of the common application and system design patterns that Kudu supports? How is Kudu architected and how has it evolved over the life of the project? There are many projects in and around the Hadoop ecosystem that rely on Zookeeper as a building block for consensus. What was the reasoning for using Raft in Kudu? How does the storage layer in Kudu differ from what would be found in systems like Hive or HBase?

What are the implementation details in the Kudu storage interface that have had the greatest impact on its overall speed and performance?

A number of the projects built for large scale data processing were not initially built with a focus on operational simplicity. What are the features of Kudu that simplify deployment and management of production infrastructure? What was the motivation for using C++ as the language target for Kudu?

If you were to start the project over today what would you do differently?

What are some situations where you would advise against using Kudu? What have you found to be the most interesting/unexpected/challenging lessons learned in the process of building and maintaining Kudu? What are you most excited about for the future of Kudu?

Contact Info

Brock

LinkedIn @brocknoland on Twitter

Jordan

LinkedIn @jordanbirdsell jbirdsell on GitHub

PhData

Website phdata on GitHub @phdatainc on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

Kudu PhData Getting Started with Apache Kudu Thomson Reuters Hadoop Oracle Exadata Slowly Changing Dimensions HDFS S3 Azure Blob Storage State Farm Stanly Black & Decker ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Parquet

Podcast Episode

ORC HBase Spark

Podcast Episode

Summary

Building an ETL pipeline is a common need across businesses and industries. It’s easy to get one started but difficult to manage as new requirements are added and greater scalability becomes necessary. Rather than duplicating the efforts of other engineers it might be best to use a hosted service to handle the plumbing so that you can focus on the parts that actually matter for your business. In this episode CTO and co-founder of Alooma, Yair Weinberger, explains how the platform addresses the common needs of data collection, manipulation, and storage while allowing for flexible processing. He describes the motivation for starting the company, how their infrastructure is architected, and the challenges of supporting multi-tenancy and a wide variety of integrations.

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 Yair Weinberger about Alooma, a company providing data pipelines as a service

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is Alooma and what is the origin story? How is the Alooma platform architected?

I want to go into stream VS batch here What are the most challenging components to scale?

How do you manage the underlying infrastructure to support your SLA of 5 nines? What are some of the complexities introduced by processing data from multiple customers with various compliance requirements?

How do you sandbox user’s processing code to avoid security exploits?

What are some of the potential pitfalls for automatic schema management in the target database? Given the large number of integrations, how do you maintain the

What are some challenges when creating integrations, isn’t it simply conforming with an external API?

For someone getting started with Alooma what does the workflow look like? What are some of the most challenging aspects of building and maintaining Alooma? What are your plans for the future of Alooma?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @yairwein on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

Alooma Convert Media Data Integration ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Tibco Mulesoft ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Informatica Microsoft SSIS OLAP Cube S3 Azure Cloud Storage Snowflake DB Redshift BigQuery Salesforce Hubspot Zendesk Spark The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data’s unifying abstraction by Jay Kreps RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) SaaS (Software as a Service) Change Data Capture Kafka Storm Google Cloud PubSub Amazon Kinesis Alooma Code Engine Zookeeper Idempotence Kafka Streams Kubernetes SOC2 Jython Docker Python Javascript Ruby Scala PII (Personally Identifiable Information) GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) Amazon EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) Sequoia Capital Lightspeed Investors Redis Aerospike Cassandra MongoDB

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

Summary

As communications between machines become more commonplace the need to store the generated data in a time-oriented manner increases. The market for timeseries data stores has many contenders, but they are not all built to solve the same problems or to scale in the same manner. In this episode the founders of TimescaleDB, Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman, discuss how Timescale was started, the problems that it solves, and how it works under the covers. They also explain how you can start using it in your infrastructure and their plans for the future.

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 Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman about Timescale DB, a scalable timeseries database built on top of PostGreSQL

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Timescale is and how the project got started? The landscape of time series databases is extensive and oftentimes difficult to navigate. How do you view your position in that market and what makes Timescale stand out from the other options? In your blog post that explains the design decisions for how Timescale is implemented you call out the fact that the inserted data is largely append only which simplifies the index management. How does Timescale handle out of order timestamps, such as from infrequently connected sensors or mobile devices? How is Timescale implemented and how has the internal architecture evolved since you first started working on it?

What impact has the 10.0 release of PostGreSQL had on the design of the project? Is timescale compatible with systems such as Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL?

For someone who wants to start using Timescale what is involved in deploying and maintaining it? What are the axes for scaling Timescale and what are the points where that scalability breaks down?

Are you aware of anyone who has deployed it on top of Citus for scaling horizontally across instances?

What has been the most challenging aspect of building and marketing Timescale? When is Timescale the wrong tool to use for time series data? One of the use cases that you call out on your website is for systems metrics and monitoring. How does Timescale fit into that ecosystem and can it be used along with tools such as Graphite or Prometheus? What are some of the most interesting uses of Timescale that you have seen? Which came first, Timescale the business or Timescale the database, and what is your strategy for ensuring that the open source project and the company around it both maintain their health? What features or improvements do you have planned for future releases of Timescale?

Contact Info

Ajay

LinkedIn @acoustik on Twitter Timescale Blog

Mike

Website LinkedIn @michaelfreedman on Twitter Timescale Blog

Timescale

Website @timescaledb on Twitter GitHub

Parting Question

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

Links

Timescale PostGreSQL Citus Timescale Design Blog Post MIT NYU Stanford SDN Princeton Machine Data Timeseries Data List of Timeseries Databases NoSQL Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) Object Relational Mapper (ORM) Grafana Tableau Kafka When Boring Is Awesome PostGreSQL RDS Google Cloud SQL Azure DB Docker Continuous Aggregates Streaming Replication PGPool II Kubernetes Docker Swarm Citus Data

Website Data Engineering Podcast Interview

Database Indexing B-Tree Index GIN Index GIST Index STE Energy Redis Graphite Prometheus pg_prometheus OpenMetrics Standard Proposal Timescale Parallel Copy Hadoop PostGIS KDB+ DevOps Internet of Things MongoDB Elastic DataBricks Apache Spark Confluent New Enterprise Associates MapD Benchmark Ventures Hortonworks 2σ Ventures CockroachDB Cloudflare EMC Timescale Blog: Why SQL is beating NoSQL, and what this means for the future of data

The intro and outro music is from a href="http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Freak_Fandango_Orchestra/Love_death_and_a_drunken_monkey/04_-_The_Hug?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss" target="_blank"…