Summary

The data ecosystem has seen a constant flurry of activity for the past several years, and it shows no signs of slowing down. With all of the products, techniques, and buzzwords being discussed it can be easy to be overcome by the hype. In this episode Juan Sequeda and Tim Gasper from data.world share their views on the core principles that you can use to ground your work and avoid getting caught in the hype cycles.

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! 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. 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/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Juan Sequeda and Tim Gasper about their views on the role of the data mesh paradigm for driving re-assessment of the foundational principles of data systems

Product experimentation is full of potholes for companies of any size, given the number of pieces (tooling, culture, process, persistence) that need to come together to be successful. Vijaye Raji (currently Statsig, formerly Facebook + Microsoft) and Sean Taylor (currently Motif Analytics, formerly Facebook + Lyft) have navigated these failure modes, and are here to help you (hopefully) do the same. This convo with Tristan + Julia is light on tooling + heavy on process: how to watch out for spillover effects in experiments, avoiding bias, how to run an experiment review, and why experiment throughput is a better indicator of success than individual experiment results. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Summary One of the most critical aspects of software projects is managing its data. Managing the operational concerns for your database can be complex and expensive, especially if you need to scale to large volumes of data, high traffic, or geographically distributed usage. Planetscale is a serverless option for your MySQL workloads that lets you focus on your applications without having to worry about managing the database or fight with differences between development and production. In this episode Nick van Wiggeren explains how the Planetscale platform is implemented, their strategies for balancing maintenance and improvements of the underlying Vitess project with their business goals, and how you can start using it today to free up the time you spend on database administration.

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! 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. 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/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast l

Summary Business intelligence is the foremost application of data in organizations of all sizes. The typical conception of how it is accessed is through a web or desktop application running on a powerful laptop. Zing Data is building a mobile native platform for business intelligence. This opens the door for busy employees to access and analyze their company information away from their desk, but it has the more powerful effect of bringing first-class support to companies operating in mobile-first economies. In this episode Sabin Thomas shares his experiences building the platform and the interesting ways that it is being used.

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. 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. Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the leading end-to-end Data Observability Platform! Trusted by the data teams at Fox, JetBlue, and PagerDuty, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, dbt models, Airflow jobs, and business intelligence tools, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks to just minutes. Monte Carlo also gives you a holistic picture

Summary The term "real-time data" brings with it a combination of excitement, uncertainty, and skepticism. The promise of insights that are always accurate and up to date is appealing to organizations, but the technical realities to make it possible have been complex and expensive. In this episode Arjun Narayan explains how the technical barriers to adopting real-time data in your analytics and applications have become surmountable by organizations of all sizes.

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! 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. 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/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Arjun Narayan about the benefits of real-time data for teams of all sizes

Interview

Introduction How did you ge

The first LIVE IRL episode!   Stephen Bailey, data engineer at Whatnot and writer of an incredibly entertaining data substack, joins Tristan for a follow-up conversation to Stephen's Coalesce talk, "Excel at nothing: how to be an effective generalist." You can read Stephen's writing at https://stkbailey.substack.com/. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Summary The data ecosystem has been growing rapidly, with new communities joining and bringing their preferred programming languages to the mix. This has led to inefficiencies in how data is stored, accessed, and shared across process and system boundaries. The Arrow project is designed to eliminate wasted effort in translating between languages, and Voltron Data was created to help grow and support its technology and community. In this episode Wes McKinney shares the ways that Arrow and its related projects are improving the efficiency of data systems and driving their next stage of evolution.

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. Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the leading end-to-end Data Observability Platform! Trusted by the data teams at Fox, JetBlue, and PagerDuty, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, dbt models, Airflow jobs, and business intelligence tools, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks to just minutes. Monte Carlo also gives you a holistic picture of data health with automatic, end-to-end lineage from ingestion to the BI layer directly out of the box. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. 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 Wes McKinney about his work at Voltron Data and on the Arrow ecosystem

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what you are building at Voltron Data and the story behind it? What is the vision for the broader data ecosystem that you are trying to realize through your investment in Arrow and related projects?

How does your work at Voltron Data contribute to the realization of that vision?

What is the impact on engineer productivity and compute efficiency that gets introduced by the impedance mismatches between language and framework representations of data? The scope and capabilities of the Arrow project have grown substantially since it was first introduced. Can you give an overview of the current features and extensions to the project? What are some of the ways that ArrowVe and its related projects can be integrated with or replace the different elements of a data platform? Can you describe how Arrow is implemented?

What are the most complex/challenging aspects of the engineering needed to support interoperable data interchange between language runtimes?

How are you balancing the desire to move quickly and improve the Arrow protocol and implementations, with the need to wait for other players in the ecosystem (e.g. database engines, compute frameworks, etc.) to add support? With the growing application of data formats such as graphs and vectors, what do you see as the role of Arrow and its ideas in those use cases? For workflows that rely on integrating structured and unstructured data, what are the options for interaction with non-tabular data? (e.g. images, documents, etc.) With your support-focused business model, how are you approaching marketing and customer education to make it viable and scalable? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Arrow used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Arrow and its ecosystem? When is Arrow the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Arrow?

Contact Info

Website wesm on GitHub @wesmckinn 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

Voltron Data Pandas

Podcast Episode

Apache Arrow Partial Differential Equation FPGA == Field-Programmable Gate Array GPU == Graphics Processing Unit Ursa Labs Voltron (cartoon) Feature Engineering PySpark Substrait Arrow Flight Acero Arrow Datafusion Velox Ibis SIMD == Single Instruction, Multiple Data Lance DuckDB

Podcast Episode

Data Threads Conference Nano-Arrow Arrow ADBC Protocol Apache Iceberg

Podcast Episode

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.a href="https://dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo"…

Summary The most expensive part of working with massive data sets is the work of retrieving and processing the files that contain the raw information. FeatureBase (formerly Pilosa) avoids that overhead by converting the data into bitmaps. In this episode Matt Jaffee explains how to model your data as bitmaps and the benefits that this representation provides for fast aggregate computation. He also discusses the improvements that have been incorporated into FeatureBase to simplify integration with the rest of your data stack, and the SQL interface that was added to make working with the product easier.

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! 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. 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/rudder Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell. Your host is Tobias Macey

Understanding the user funnel and measuring conversion is critical to Acorns as a subscription business. The engineering team turned to Rudderstack to track customer interaction in near real-time across web, ios, and android. However, transforming that into actionable insights required carefully curated SQL spanning two datastores. Come learn how the data engineering team used dbt to build a centralized metrics interface and dynamic funnels in a data landscape spanning Rudderstack, Redshift, Databricks, and dbt with Tableau as our visualization tool.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MTbqysGH_9oxUPKgQQO2MYM1f1XUhSVw_ERDvaZ8Qsg/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Summary The problems that are easiest to fix are the ones that you prevent from happening in the first place. Sifflet is a platform that brings your entire data stack into focus to improve the reliability of your data assets and empower collaboration across your teams. In this episode CEO and founder Salma Bakouk shares her views on the causes and impacts of "data entropy" and how you can tame it before it leads to failures.

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! 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. 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/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 Salma Bakouk about achieving data reliability and reducing entropy within your data stack with sifflet

Interview

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

We talked about:

Nikola’s background Making the first steps towards a transition to BI and Analytics Engineering Learning the skills necessary to transition to Analytics Engineering The in-between period – from Marketing to Analytics Engineering Nikola’s current responsibilities Understanding what a Data Model is Tools needed to work as an Analytics Engineer The Analytics Engineering role over time The importance of DBT for Analytics Engineers Where can one learn about data modeling theory? Going from Ancient Greek and Latin to understanding Data (Just-In-Time Learning) The importance of having domain knowledge to analytics engineering Suggestion for those wishing to transition into analytics engineering The importance of having a mentor when transitioning Finding a mentor Helpful newsletters and blogs Finding Nikola online

Links:

Nikola's LinkedIn account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-maksimovic-40188183/

ML Zoomcamp: https://github.com/alexeygrigorev/mlbookcamp-code/tree/master/course-zoomcamp

Join DataTalks.Club: https://datatalks.club/slack.html

Our events: https://datatalks.club/events.html

WARNING: This episode contains detailed discussion of data contracts. The modern data stack introduces challenges in terms of collaboration between data producers and consumers. How might we solve them to ultimately build trust in data quality? Chad Sanderson leads the data platform team at Convoy, a late-stage series-E freight technology startup. He manages everything from instrumentation and data ingestion to ETL, in addition to the metrics layer, experimentation software and ML.  Prukalpa Sankar is a co-founder of Atlan, where she develops products that enable improved collaboration between diverse users like businesses, analysts, and engineers, creating higher efficiency and agility in data projects.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Nasdaq at large has always been a data driven company. Over the years how we access and model data has changed but the desire for data driven outcomes has not. Over the past couple years it has become critical that we accelerate the ability to get access to data to our key business users. Traditionally the Nasdaq North Americans Market team has gained access to data via a number of avenues, most of which required some level of a data engineer to build, schedule, and deliver canned reports. By embracing tools like dbt we are seeking to increase the capabilities of the business units themselves to own the creation and schedule of key metrics and make quicker/better decisions because of it.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1auwcYY68e6gY__lh7rIgr3yQJreYxJVB/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110293204340061069659&rtpof=true&sd=true

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Summary CreditKarma builds data products that help consumers take advantage of their credit and financial capabilities. To make that possible they need a reliable data platform that empowers all of the organization’s stakeholders. In this episode Vishnu Venkataraman shares the journey that he and his team have taken to build and evolve their systems and improve the product offerings that they are able to support.

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! 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. 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/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 Vishnu Venkataraman about building the data platform at CreditKarma and the forces that shaped the design

Interview

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

Summary Despite the best efforts of data engineers, data is as messy as the real world. Entity resolution and fuzzy matching are powerful utilities for cleaning up data from disconnected sources, but it has typically required custom development and training machine learning models. Sonal Goyal created and open-sourced Zingg as a generalized tool for data mastering and entity resolution to reduce the effort involved in adopting those practices. In this episode she shares the story behind the project, the details of how it is implemented, and how you can use it for your own data projects.

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 extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder 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 Sonal Goyal about Zingg, an open source entity resolution frame

Abhi is a growth and data leader, and an excellent Twitter follow. Most recently, he was Head of Growth and Analytics at Flexport, where he helped the company to grow 10x over the past 3 years. Previously, Abhi led growth and data teams at Keap, Hustle, and Honeybook. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Abhi explains his methodology for setting up a new growth data organization, and how you might be falling victim to the dreaded "arbitrary uniqueness" bug. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs

Since the dawn of time (or at least the last few years), the proserv team has been “dbt_project_evaluator”s. They've written articles, given talks, created training courses, and personally delivered just a truly obscene amount of audits. Up until now, evaluating your own dbt project—even with every aforementioned resource—would be incredibly time consuming. To quote dbt Lab’s SQL style guide, “brain time is expensive.” Enter: dbt_project_evaluator. In this talk, Grace Goheen (dbt Labs) which share how this package enables analytics engineers to follow dbt Labs own best practices by automatically curating a list of improvements, in the dbt-language of “models” and “tests” that they already know and love. By decreasing the “discovery” period, analytics engineers can use their brain time to work on actually implementing the recommended changes.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1U7CaoSceXumbzlPGqqAQukaz1YdOgT46sb-M6x_LNCw/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Summary One of the most impactful technologies for data analytics in recent years has been dbt. It’s hard to have a conversation about data engineering or analysis without mentioning it. Despite its widespread adoption there are still rough edges in its workflow that cause friction for data analysts. To help simplify the adoption and management of dbt projects Nandam Karthik helped create Optimus. In this episode he shares his experiences working with organizations to adopt analytics engineering patterns and the ways that Optimus and dbt were combined to let data analysts deliver insights without the roadblocks of complex pipeline management.

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! 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. 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/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 Nand

The dbt Cloud IDE has gotten a major upgrade. With a fresh new coat of paint, a re-written codebase, and a suite of oft-requested features, the new IDE should amount to a significant quality of life improvement for your team – allowing you to deliver even more value to the business. Experience it in action, and see how to safely distribute data development work in this hands-on session with the dbt Labs product team.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11-71MIh9ASGM2n-i0KxXc_yf6w1tq0l1bUobWdnfloY/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

A Senior Business Analyst, an Analytics Engineer, and a Data Quality Engineer walk into the office. All three of them ask for dbt. Why? Join Coco Haury (WEX, Inc.) to hear about the universal appeal of dbt to folks outside traditional data engineer and analyst roles, and how dbt has helped WEX modernize their entire enterprise data platform.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XNphR_il_3SGy9dU7G7PxmVoCXCCWBuFMvZYESN6KgE/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.