Summary In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast, host Tobias Macey welcomes back Nick Schrock, CTO and founder of Dagster Labs, to discuss Compass - a Slack-native, agentic analytics system designed to keep data teams connected with business stakeholders. Nick shares his journey from initial skepticism to embracing agentic AI as model and application advancements made it practical for governed workflows, and explores how Compass redefines the relationship between data teams and stakeholders by shifting analysts into steward roles, capturing and governing context, and integrating with Slack where collaboration already happens. The conversation covers organizational observability through Compass's conversational system of record, cost control strategies, and the implications of agentic collaboration on Conway's Law, as well as what's next for Compass and Nick's optimistic views on AI-accelerated software engineering.

Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData teams everywhere face the same problem: they're forcing ML models, streaming data, and real-time processing through orchestration tools built for simple ETL. The result? Inflexible infrastructure that can't adapt to different workloads. That's why Cash App and Cisco rely on Prefect. Cash App's fraud detection team got what they needed - flexible compute options, isolated environments for custom packages, and seamless data exchange between workflows. Each model runs on the right infrastructure, whether that's high-memory machines or distributed compute. Orchestration is the foundation that determines whether your data team ships or struggles. ETL, ML model training, AI Engineering, Streaming - Prefect runs it all from ingestion to activation in one platform. Whoop and 1Password also trust Prefect for their data operations. If these industry leaders use Prefect for critical workflows, see what it can do for you at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prefect.Data migrations are brutal. They drag on for months—sometimes years—burning through resources and crushing team morale. Datafold's AI-powered Migration Agent changes all that. Their unique combination of AI code translation and automated data validation has helped companies complete migrations up to 10 times faster than manual approaches. And they're so confident in their solution, they'll actually guarantee your timeline in writing. Ready to turn your year-long migration into weeks? Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today for the details. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Nick Schrock about building an AI analyst that keeps data teams in the loopInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Can you describe what Compass is and the story behind it?context repository structurehow to keep it relevant/avoid sprawl/duplicationproviding guardrailshow does a tool like Compass help provide feedback/insights back to the data teams?preparing the data warehouse for effective introspection by the AILLM selectioncost managementcaching/materializing ad-hoc queriesWhy Slack and enterprise chat are important to b2b softwareHow AI is changing stakeholder relationshipsHow not to overpromise AI capabilities How does Compass relate to BI?How does Compass relate to Dagster and Data Infrastructure?What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Compass used?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Compass?When is Compass the wrong choice?What do you have planned for the future of Compass?Contact Info LinkedInParting 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 AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.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.Links DagsterDagster LabsDagster PlusDagster CompassChris Bergh DataOps EpisodeRise of Medium Code blog postContext EngineeringData StewardInformation ArchitectureConway's LawTemporal durable execution frameworkThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Summary In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast Pete DeJoy, co-founder and product lead at Astronomer, talks about building and managing Airflow pipelines on Astronomer and the upcoming improvements in Airflow 3. Pete shares his journey into data engineering, discusses Astronomer's contributions to the Airflow project, and highlights the critical role of Airflow in powering operational data products. He covers the evolution of Airflow, its position in the data ecosystem, and the challenges faced by data engineers, including infrastructure management and observability. The conversation also touches on the upcoming Airflow 3 release, which introduces data awareness, architectural improvements, and multi-language support, and Astronomer's observability suite, Astro Observe, which provides insights and proactive recommendations for Airflow users.

Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData migrations are brutal. They drag on for months—sometimes years—burning through resources and crushing team morale. Datafold's AI-powered Migration Agent changes all that. Their unique combination of AI code translation and automated data validation has helped companies complete migrations up to 10 times faster than manual approaches. And they're so confident in their solution, they'll actually guarantee your timeline in writing. Ready to turn your year-long migration into weeks? Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today for the details.Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Pete DeJoy about building and managing Airflow pipelines on Astronomer and the upcoming improvements in Airflow 3Interview IntroductionCan you describe what Astronomer is and the story behind it?How would you characterize the relationship between Airflow and Astronomer?Astronomer just released your State of Airflow 2025 Report yesterday and it is the largest data engineering survey ever with over 5,000 respondents. Can you talk a bit about top level findings in the report?What about the overall growth of the Airflow project over time?How have the focus and features of Astronomer changed since it was last featured on the show in 2017?Astro Observe GA’d in early February, what does the addition of pipeline observability mean for your customers? What are other capabilities similar in scope to observability that Astronomer is looking at adding to the platform?Why is Airflow so critical in providing an elevated Observability–or cataloging, or something simlar - experience in a DataOps platform? What are the notable evolutions in the Airflow project and ecosystem in that time?What are the core improvements that are planned for Airflow 3.0?What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Astro used?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Airflow and Astro?What do you have planned for the future of Astro/Astronomer/Airflow?Contact Info LinkedInParting 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 AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.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.Links AstronomerAirflowMaxime BeaucheminMongoDBDatabricksConfluentSparkKafkaDagsterPodcast EpisodePrefectAirflow 3The Rise of the Data Engineer blog postdbtJupyter NotebookZapiercosmos library for dbt in AirflowRuffAirflow Custom OperatorSnowflakeThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Summary In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast, host Tobias Macey welcomes back Chris Berg, CEO of DataKitchen, to discuss his ongoing mission to simplify the lives of data engineers. Chris explains the challenges faced by data engineers, such as constant system failures, the need for rapid changes, and high customer demands. Chris delves into the concept of DataOps, its evolution, and the misappropriation of related terms like data mesh and data observability. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on processes and systems rather than just tools to improve data engineering workflows. Chris also introduces DataKitchen's open-source tools, DataOps TestGen and DataOps Observability, designed to automate data quality validation and monitor data journeys in production. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData lakes are notoriously complex. For data engineers who battle to build and scale high quality data workflows on the data lake, Starburst is an end-to-end data lakehouse platform built on Trino, the query engine Apache Iceberg was designed for, with complete support for all table formats including Apache Iceberg, Hive, and Delta Lake. Trusted by teams of all sizes, including Comcast and Doordash. Want to see Starburst in action? Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/starburst and get $500 in credits to try Starburst Galaxy today, the easiest and fastest way to get started using Trino.Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Chris Bergh about his tireless quest to simplify the lives of data engineersInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Can you describe what DataKitchen is and the story behind it?You helped to define and popularize "DataOps", which then went through a journey of misappropriation similar to "DevOps", and has since faded in use. What is your view on the realities of "DataOps" today?Out of the popularized wave of "DataOps" tools came subsequent trends in data observability, data reliability engineering, etc. How have those cycles influenced the way that you think about the work that you are doing at DataKitchen?The data ecosystem went through a massive growth period over the past ~7 years, and we are now entering a cycle of consolidation. What are the fundamental shifts that we have gone through as an industry in the management and application of data?What are the challenges that never went away?You recently open sourced the dataops-testgen and dataops-observability tools. What are the outcomes that you are trying to produce with those projects?What are the areas of overlap with existing tools and what are the unique capabilities that you are offering?Can you talk through the technical implementation of your new obserability and quality testing platform?What does the onboarding and integration process look like?Once a team has one or both tools set up, what are the typical points of interaction that they will have over the course of their workday?What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen dataops-observability/testgen used?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on promoting DataOps?What do you have planned for the future of your work at DataKitchen?Contact Info LinkedInParting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?Links DataKitchenPodcast EpisodeNASADataOps ManifestoData Reliability EngineeringData ObservabilitydbtDevOps Enterprise SummitBuilding The Data Warehouse by Bill Inmon (affiliate link)dataops-testgen, dataops-observabilityFree Data Quality and Data Observability CertificationDatabricksDORA MetricsDORA for dataThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Summary

Data transformation is a key activity for all of the organizational roles that interact with data. Because of its importance and outsized impact on what is possible for downstream data consumers it is critical that everyone is able to collaborate seamlessly. SQLMesh was designed as a unifying tool that is simple to work with but powerful enough for large-scale transformations and complex projects. In this episode Toby Mao explains how it works, the importance of automatic column-level lineage tracking, and how you can start using it today.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack- Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Toby Mao about SQLMesh, an open source DataOps framework designed to scale data transformations with ease of collaboration and validation built in

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what SQLMesh is and the story behind it?

DataOps is a term that has been co-opted and overloaded. What are the concepts that you are trying to convey with that term in the context of SQLMesh?

What are the rough edges in existing toolchains/workflows that you are trying to address with SQLMesh?

How do those rough edges impact the productivity and effectiveness of teams using those

Can you describe how SQLMesh is implemented?

How have the design and goals evolved since you first started working on it?

What are the lessons that you have learned from dbt which have informed the design and functionality of SQLMesh? For teams who have already invested in dbt, what is the migration path from or integration with dbt? You have some built-in integration with/awareness of orchestrators (currently Airflow). What are the benefits of making the transformation tool aware of the orchestrator? What do you see as the potential benefits of integration with e.g. data-diff? What are the second-order benefits of using a tool such as SQLMesh that addresses the more mechanical aspects of managing transformation workfows and the associated dependency chains? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen SQLMesh used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on SQLMesh? When is SQLMesh the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of SQLMesh?

Contact Info

tobymao on GitHub @captaintobs 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 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

SQLMesh Tobiko Data SAS AirBnB Minerva SQLGlot Cron AST == Abstract Syntax Tree Pandas Terraform dbt

Podcast Episode

SQLFluff

Podcast.init Episode

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

Summary

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

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Tevje Olin about Agile Data Engine, a platform that combines data modeling, transformations, continuous delivery and workload orchestration to help you manage your data products and the whole lifecycle of your warehouse

Interview

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

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

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

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

Can you describe how Agile Data Engine is architected?

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

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

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

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

Guest Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

About Agile Data Engine

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

Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary

This podcast started almost exactly six years ago, and the technology landscape was much different than it is now. In that time there have been a number of generational shifts in how data engineering is done. In this episode I reflect on some of the major themes and take a brief look forward at some of the upcoming changes.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm reflecting on the major trends in data engineering over the past 6 years

Interview

Introduction 6 years of running the Data Engineering Podcast Around the first time that data engineering was discussed as a role

Followed on from hype about "data science"

Hadoop era Streaming Lambda and Kappa architectures

Not really referenced anymore

"Big Data" era of capture everything has shifted to focusing on data that presents value

Regulatory environment increases risk, better tools introduce more capability to understand what data is useful

Data catalogs

Amundsen and Alation

Orchestration engine

Oozie, etc. -> Airflow and Luigi -> Dagster, Prefect, Lyft, etc. Orchestration is now a part of most vertical tools

Cloud data warehouses Data lakes DataOps and MLOps Data quality to data observability Metadata for everything

Data catalog -> data discovery -> active metadata

Business intelligence

Read only reports to metric/semantic layers Embedded analytics and data APIs

Rise of ELT

dbt Corresponding introduction of reverse ETL

What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on running the podcast? What do you have planned for the future of the podcast?

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

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

Looking for the simplest way to get the freshest data possible to your teams? Because let's face it: if real-time were easy, everyone would be using it. Look no further than Materialize, the streaming database you already know how to use.

Materialize’s PostgreSQL-compatible interface lets users leverage the tools they already use, with unsurpassed simplicity enabled by full ANSI SQL support. Delivered as a single platform with the separation of storage and compute, strict-serializability, active replication, horizontal scalability and workload isolation — Materialize is now the fastest way to build products with streaming data, drastically reducing the time, expertise, cost and maintenance traditionally associated with implementation of real-time features.

Sign up now for early access to Materialize and get started with the power of streaming data with the same simplicity and low implementation cost as batch cloud data warehouses.

Go to materialize.comSupport Data Engineering Podcast

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

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is the metadata hub for your data ecosystem. Instead of locking your metadata into a new silo, unleash its transformative potential with Atlan’s active metadata capabilities. Push information about data freshness and quality to your business intelligence, automatically scale up and down your warehouse based on usage patterns, and let the bots answer those questions in Slack so that the humans can focus on delivering real value. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today to learn more about how Atlan’s active metadata platform is helping pioneering data teams like Postman, Plaid, WeWork & Unilever achieve extraordinary things with metadata and escape the chaos. Prefect is the modern Dataflow Automation platform for the modern data stack, empowering data practitioners to build, run and monitor robust pipelines at scale. Guided by the principle that the orchestrator shouldn’t get in your way, Prefect is the only tool of its kind to offer the flexibility to write code as workflows. Prefect specializes in glueing together the disparate pieces of a pipeline, and integrating with modern distributed compute libraries to bring power where you need it, when you need it. Trusted by thousands of organizations and supported by over 20,000 community members, Prefect powers over 100MM business critical tasks a month. For more information on Prefect, visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/prefect. Data engineers don’t enjoy writing, maintaining, and modifying ETL pipelines all day, every day. Especially once they realize 90% of all major data sources like Google Analytics, Salesforce, Adwords, Facebook, Spreadsheets, etc., are already available as plug-and-play connectors with reliable, intuitive SaaS solutions. Hevo Data is a highly reliable and intuitive data pipeline platform used by data engineers from 40+ countries to set up and run low-latency ELT pipelines with zero maintenance. Boasting more than 150 out-of-the-box connectors that can be set up in minutes, Hevo also allows you to monitor and control your pipelines. You get: real-time data flow visibility, fail-safe mechanisms, and alerts if anything breaks; preload transformations and auto-schema mapping precisely control how data lands in your destination; models and workflows to transform data for analytics; and reverse-ETL capability to move the transformed data back to your business software to inspire timely action. All of this, plus its transparent pricing and 24*7 live support, makes it consistently voted by users as the Leader in the Data Pipeline category on review platforms like G2. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/hevodata and sign up for a free 14-day trial that also comes with 24×7 support. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Shane Gibson about how to bring Agile practices to your data management workflows

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Info

LinkedIn @shagility on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

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

Podcast Episode

Great Expectations

Podcast Episode

Soda Data

Podcast Episode

Google DataStore Unfix.work Activity Schema

Podcast Episode

Data Vault

Podcast Episode

Star Schema Lean Methodology Scrum Kanban

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

Sponsored By: Atlan:

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

Our friends at Atlan started out as a data team themselves and faced all this collaboration chaos themselves, and started building Atlan as an internal tool for themselves. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more.

Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription.Prefect:

Prefect is the modern Dataflow Automation platform for the modern data stack, empowering data practitioners to build, run and monitor robust pipelines at scale. Guided by the principle that the orchestrator shouldn’t get in your way, Prefect is the only tool of its kind to offer the flexibility to write code as workflows. Prefect specializes in glueing together the disparate pieces of a pipeline, and integrating with modern distributed compute libraries to bring power where you need it, when you need it. Trusted by thousands of organizations and supported by over 20,000 community members, Prefect powers over 100MM business critical tasks a month. For more information on Prefect, visit…

Summary The proliferation of sensors and GPS devices has dramatically increased the number of applications for spatial data, and the need for scalable geospatial analytics. In order to reduce the friction involved in aggregating disparate data sets that share geographic similarities the Unfolded team built a platform that supports working across raster, vector, and tabular data in a single system. In this episode Isaac Brodsky explains how the Unfolded platform is architected, their experience joining the team at Foursquare, and how you can start using it for analyzing your spatial data today.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is the metadata hub for your data ecosystem. Instead of locking your metadata into a new silo, unleash its transformative potential with Atlan’s active metadata capabilities. Push information about data freshness and quality to your business intelligence, automatically scale up and down your warehouse based on usage patterns, and let the bots answer those questions in Slack so that the humans can focus on delivering real value. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today to learn more about how Atlan’s active metadata platform is helping pioneering data teams like Postman, Plaid, WeWork & Unilever achieve extraordinary things with metadata and escape the chaos. 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. Unstruk is the DataOps platform for your unstructured data. The options for ingesting, organizing, and curating unstructured files are complex, expensive, and bespoke. Unstruk Data is changing that equation with their platform approach to manage your unstructured assets. Built to handle all of your real-world data, from videos and images, to 3d point clouds and geospatial records, to industry specific file formats, Unstruk streamlines your workflow by converting human hours into machine minutes, and automatically alerting you to insights found in your dark data. Unstruk handles data versioning, lineage tracking, duplicate detection, consistency validation, as well as enrichment through sources including machine learning models, 3rd party data, and web APIs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/unstruk today to transform your messy collection of unstructured data files into actionable assets that power your business. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Isaac Brodsky about Foursquare’s Unfolded platform for working w

Summary Data analysis is a valuable exercise that is often out of reach of non-technical users as a result of the complexity of data systems. In order to lower the barrier to entry Ryan Buick created the Canvas application with a spreadsheet oriented workflow that is understandable to a wide audience. In this episode Ryan explains how he and his team have designed their platform to bring everyone onto a level playing field and the benefits that it provides to the organization.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is the metadata hub for your data ecosystem. Instead of locking your metadata into a new silo, unleash its transformative potential with Atlan’s active metadata capabilities. Push information about data freshness and quality to your business intelligence, automatically scale up and down your warehouse based on usage patterns, and let the bots answer those questions in Slack so that the humans can focus on delivering real value. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today to learn more about how Atlan’s active metadata platform is helping pioneering data teams like Postman, Plaid, WeWork & Unilever achieve extraordinary things with metadata and escape the chaos. 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. Unstruk is the DataOps platform for your unstructured data. The options for ingesting, organizing, and curating unstructured files are complex, expensive, and bespoke. Unstruk Data is changing that equation with their platform approach to manage your unstructured assets. Built to handle all of your real-world data, from videos and images, to 3d point clouds and geospatial records, to industry specific file formats, Unstruk streamlines your workflow by converting human hours into machine minutes, and automatically alerting you to insights found in your dark data. Unstruk handles data versioning, lineage tracking, duplicate detection, consistency validation, as well as enrichment through sources including machine learning models, 3rd party data, and web APIs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/unstruk today to transform your messy collection of unstructured data files into actionable assets that power your business. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ryan Buick about Canvas, a spreadsheet interface for your data that lets everyone on your team explore data without having to learn SQL

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved

Summary Building a well rounded and effective data team is an iterative process, and the first hire can set the stage for future success or failure. Trupti Natu has been the first data hire multiple times and gone through the process of building teams across the different stages of growth. In this episode she shares her thoughts and insights on how to be intentional about establishing your own data team.

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. Atlan is the metadata hub for your data ecosystem. Instead of locking your metadata into a new silo, unleash its transformative potential with Atlan’s active metadata capabilities. Push information about data freshness and quality to your business intelligence, automatically scale up and down your warehouse based on usage patterns, and let the bots answer those questions in Slack so that the humans can focus on delivering real value. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today to learn more about how Atlan’s active metadata platform is helping pioneering data teams like Postman, Plaid, WeWork & Unilever achieve extraordinary things with metadata and escape the chaos. 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. Unstruk is the DataOps platform for your unstructured data. The options for ingesting, organizing, and curating unstructured files are complex, expensive, and bespoke. Unstruk Data is changing that equation with their platform approach to manage your unstructured assets. Built to handle all of your real-world data, from videos and images, to 3d point clouds and geospatial records, to industry specific file formats, Unstruk streamlines your workflow by converting human hours into machine minutes, and automatically alerting you to insights found in your dark data. Unstruk handles data versioning, lineage tracking, duplicate detection, consistency vali

Summary Putting machine learning models into production and keeping them there requires investing in well-managed systems to manage the full lifecycle of data cleaning, training, deployment and monitoring. This requires a repeatable and evolvable set of processes to keep it functional. The term MLOps has been coined to encapsulate all of these principles and the broader data community is working to establish a set of best practices and useful guidelines for streamlining adoption. In this episode Demetrios Brinkmann and David Aponte share their perspectives on this rapidly changing space and what they have learned from their work building the MLOps community through blog posts, podcasts, and discussion forums.

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! 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. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Demetrios Brinkmann and David Aponte about what you need to know about MLOps as a data engineer

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what MLOps is?

How does it relate to DataOps? DevOps? (is it just another buzzword?)

What is your interest and involvement in the space of MLOps? What are the open and active questions in the MLOps community? Who is responsible for MLOps in an organization?

What is the role of the data engineer in that process?

What are the core capabilities that are necessary to support an "MLOps" workflow? How do the current platform technologies support the adoption of MLOps workflows?

What are the areas that are currently underdeveloped/underserved?

Can you describe the technical and organizational design/architecture decisions that need to be made when endeavoring to adopt MLOps practices? What are some of the common requirements for supporting ML workflows?

What are some of the ways that requirements become bespoke to a given organization or project?

What are the opportunities for standardization or consolidation in the tooling for MLOps?

What are the pieces that are always going to require custom engineering?

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected approaches to MLOps workflows/platforms that you have seen? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you

Summary Data engineering is a practice that is multi-faceted and requires integration with a large number of systems. This often means working across multiple tools to get the job done which can introduce significant cost to productivity due to the number of context switches. Rivery is a platform designed to reduce this incidental complexity and provide a single system for working across the different stages of the data lifecycle. In this episode CEO and founder Itamar Ben hemo explains how his experiences in the industry led to his vision for the Rivery platform as a single place to build end-to-end analytical workflows, including how it is architected and how you can start using it today for your own work.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days 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. Are you looking for a structured and battle-tested approach for learning data engineering? Would you like to know how you can build proper data infrastructures that are built to last? Would you like to have a seasoned industry expert guide you and answer all your questions? Join Pipeline Academy, the worlds first data engineering bootcamp. Learn in small groups with likeminded professionals for 9 weeks part-time to level up in your career. The course covers the most relevant and essential data and software engineering topics that enable you to start your journey as a professional data engineer or analytics engineer. Plus we have AMAs with world-class guest speakers every week! The next cohort starts in April 2022. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/academy and apply now! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Itamar Ben Hemo about Rivery, a SaaS platform designed to provide an end-to-end solution for Ingestion, Transformation, Orchestration,

Summary Streaming data sources are becoming more widely available as tools to handle their storage and distribution mature. However it is still a challenge to analyze this data as it arrives, while supporting integration with static data in a unified syntax. Deephaven is a project that was designed from the ground up to offer an intuitive way for you to bring your code to your data, whether it is streaming or static without having to know which is which. In this episode Pete Goddard, founder and CEO of Deephaven shares his journey with the technology that powers the platform, how he and his team are pouring their energy into the community edition of the technology so that you can use it freely in your own work.

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 StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Pete Goddard about his work at Deephaven, a query engine optimized for manipulating and merging streaming and static data

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Deephaven is and the story behind it? What is the role of Deephaven in the context of an organization’s data platform?

What are the upstream and downstream systems and teams that it is likely to be integrated with?

Who are the target users of Deephaven and how does that influence the feature priorities and design of the platform? comparison of use cases/experience with Materialize What are the different components that comprise the suite of functionality in Deephaven? How have you architected the system?

What are some of the ways t

Summary Along with globalization of our societies comes the need to analyze the geospatial and geotemporal data that is needed to manage the growth in commerce, communications, and other activities. In order to make geospatial analytics more maintainable and scalable there has been an increase in the number of database engines that provide extensions to their SQL syntax that supports manipulation of spatial data. In this episode Matthew Forrest shares his experiences of working in the domain of geospatial analytics and the application of SQL dialects to his analysis.

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 StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Matthew Forrest about doing spatial analysis in SQL

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what spatial SQL is and some of the use cases that it is relevant for? compatibility with/comparison to syntax from PostGIS What is involved in implementation of spatial logic in database engines mapping geospatial concepts into declarative syntax foundational data types data modeling workflow for analyzing spatial data sets outside of database engines translating from e.g. geopandas to SQL level of support in database engines for spatial data types What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen spatial SQL used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working with spatial SQL? When is SQL the wrong choice for spatial analysis? What do you have planned for the future o

Summary The Data Engineering Podcast has been going for five years now and has included conversations and interviews with a huge number of guests, covering a broad range of topics. In addition to that, the host curated the essays contained in the book "97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know", using the knowledge and context gained from running the show to inform the selection process. In this episode he shares some reflections on producing the podcast, compiling the book, and relevant trends in the ecosystem of data engineering. He also provides some advice for those who are early in their career of data engineering and looking to advance in their roles.

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 StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m doing something a bit different. I’m going to talk about some of the lessons that I have learned while running the podcast, compiling the book "97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know", and some of the themes that I’ve observed throughout.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Overview of the 97 things book

How the project came about Goals of the book

What are the paths into data engineering? What are some of the macroscopic themes in the industry? What are some of the microscopic details that are useful/necessary to succeed as a data engineer? What are some of the career/team/organizational details that are helpful for data engineers? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected outcomes/feedback that I have seen from running the podcast and working on the book

Summary Data platforms are exemplified by a complex set of connections that are subject to a set of constantly evolving requirements. In order to make this a tractable problem it is necessary to define boundaries for communication between concerns, which brings with it the need to establish interface contracts for communicating across those boundaries. The recent move toward the data mesh as a formalized architecture that builds on this design provides the language that data teams need to make this a more organized effort. In this episode Abhi Sivasailam shares his experience designing and implementing a data mesh solution with his team at Flexport, and the importance of defining and enforcing data contracts that are implemented at those domain boundaries.

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 StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Abhi Sivasailam about the different social and technical interfaces available for defining and enforcing data contracts

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what your working definition of a "data contract" is?

What are the goals and purpose of these contracts?

What are the locations and methods of defining a data contract?

What kind of information needs to be encoded in a contract definition?

How do you manage enforcement of contracts? manifestations of contracts in data mesh implementation ergonomics (technical and social) of data contracts and how to prevent them from prohibiting productivity What are the most interesting, innovative

Summary Applications of data have grown well beyond the venerable business intelligence dashboards that organizations have relied on for decades. Now it is being used to power consumer facing services, influence organizational behaviors, and build sophisticated machine learning systems. Given this increased level of importance it has become necessary for everyone in the business to treat data as a product in the same way that software applications have driven the early 2000s. In this episode Brian McMillan shares his work on the book "Building Data Products" and how he is working to educate business users and data professionals about the combination of technical, economical, and business considerations that need to be blended for these projects to succeed.

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! 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. StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Brian McMillan about building data products and his book to introduce the work of data analysts and engineers to non-programmers

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what motivated you to write a book about the work of building data products?

Who is your target audience? What are the main goals that you are trying to achieve through the book?

What

Summary Reverse ETL is a product category that evolved from the landscape of customer data platforms with a number of companies offering their own implementation of it. While struggling with the work of automating data integration workflows with marketing, sales, and support tools Brian Leonard accidentally discovered this need himself and turned it into the open source framework Grouparoo. In this episode he explains why he decided to turn these efforts into an open core business, how the platform is implemented, and the benefits of having an open source contender in the landscape of operational analytics products.

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! StreamSets DataOps Platform is the world’s first single platform for building smart data pipelines across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Build, run, monitor and manage data pipelines confidently with an end-to-end data integration platform that’s built for constant change. Amp up your productivity with an easy-to-navigate interface and 100s of pre-built connectors. And, get pipelines and new hires up and running quickly with powerful, reusable components that work across batch and streaming. Once you’re up and running, your smart data pipelines are resilient to data drift. Those ongoing and unexpected changes in schema, semantics, and infrastructure. Finally, one single pane of glass for operating and monitoring all your data pipelines. The full transparency and control you desire for your data operations. Get started building pipelines in minutes for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/streamsets. The first 10 listeners of the podcast that subscribe to StreamSets’ Professional Tier, receive 2 months free after their first month. 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 Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Brian Leonard about Grouparoo, an open source framework for managing your reverse ETL pipelines

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Grouparoo is and the story behind it? What are the core requirements for building a reverse ETL system?

What are the additional capabilities that users of the system ask for as they get more advanced in their usage?

Who is your target user for Grouparoo and how does that influence your priorities on feature development and UX design? What are the benefits of building an open source core for a reverse ETL platform as compared to the other commercial options? Can you describe the architecture and implementation of the Grouparoo project?

What are the additional systems that you have built to support the hosted offering? How have the design and goals of the

Summary The data that you have access to affects the questions that you can answer. By using external data sources you can drastically increase the range of analysis that is available to your organization. The challenge comes in all of the operational aspects of finding, accessing, organizing, and serving that data. In this episode Mark Hookey discusses how he and his team at Demyst do all of the DataOps for external data sources so that you don’t have to, including the systems necessary to organize and catalog the various collections that they host, the various serving layers to provide query interfaces that match your platform, and the utility of having a single place to access a multitude of information. If you are having trouble answering questions for your business with the data that you generate and collect internally, then it is definitely worthwhile to explore the information available from external sources.

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! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Mark Hookey about Demyst Data, a platform for operationalizing external data

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Demyst is and the story behind it?

What are the services and systems that you provide for organizations to incorporate external sources in their data workflows? Who are your target customers?

What are some examples of data sets that an organization might want to use in their analytics?

How are these different from SaaS data that an organization might integrate with tools such as Stitcher and Fivetran?

What are some of the challenges that are introduced by working with these external data sets?

If an organization isn’t using Demyst what are some

Summary The accuracy and availability of data has become critically important to the day-to-day operation of businesses. Similar to the practice of site reliability engineering as a means of ensuring consistent uptime of web services, there has been a new trend of building data reliability engineering practices in companies that rely heavily on their data. In this episode Egor Gryaznov explains how this practice manifests from a technical and organizational perspective and how you can start adopting it in your own teams.

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 Schema changes, missing data, and volume anomalies caused by your data sources can happen without any advanced notice if you lack visibility into your data-in-motion. That leaves DataOps reactive to data quality issues and can make your consumers lose confidence in your data. By connecting to your pipeline orchestrator like Apache Airflow and centralizing your end-to-end metadata, Databand.ai lets you identify data quality issues and their root causes from a single dashboard. With Databand.ai, you’ll know whether the data moving from your sources to your warehouse will be available, accurate, and usable when it arrives. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/databand to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Databand.ai and take control of your data quality today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Egor Gryaznov, co-founder and CTO of Bigeye, about the ideas and practices of data reliability engineering and how to integrate it into your systems

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What does the term "Data Reliability Engineering" mean? What is encompassed under the umbrella of Data Reliability Engineering?

How does it compare to the concepts from site reliability engineering? Is DRE just a repackaged version of DataOps?

Why is Data Reliability Engineering particularly important now? Who is responsible for the practice of DRE in an organization? What are some areas of innovation that teams are focusing on to support a DRE practice? What are the tools that teams are using to improve the reliability of their data operations? What are the organizational systems that need to be in place to support a DRE practice?

What are some potential roadblocks that teams might have to address when planning and implementing a DRE strategy?

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected approaches/solutions to DRE that you have seen? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Data Reliability Engineering? Is Data Reliability Engi