Summary In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast Akshay Agrawal from Marimo discusses the innovative new Python notebook environment, which offers a reactive execution model, full Python integration, and built-in UI elements to enhance the interactive computing experience. He discusses the challenges of traditional Jupyter notebooks, such as hidden states and lack of interactivity, and how Marimo addresses these issues with features like reactive execution and Python-native file formats. Akshay also explores the broader landscape of programmatic notebooks, comparing Marimo to other tools like Jupyter, Streamlit, and Hex, highlighting its unique approach to creating data apps directly from notebooks and eliminating the need for separate app development. The conversation delves into the technical architecture of Marimo, its community-driven development, and future plans, including a commercial offering and enhanced AI integration, emphasizing Marimo's role in bridging the gap between data exploration and production-ready applications.

Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementTired of data migrations that drag on for months or even years? What if I told you there's a way to cut that timeline by up to 6x while guaranteeing accuracy? Datafold's Migration Agent is the only AI-powered solution that doesn't just translate your code; it validates every single data point to ensure perfect parity between your old and new systems. Whether you're moving from Oracle to Snowflake, migrating stored procedures to dbt, or handling complex multi-system migrations, they deliver production-ready code with a guaranteed timeline and fixed price. Stop burning budget on endless consulting hours. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold to book a demo and see how they're turning months-long migration nightmares into week-long success stories.Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Akshay Agrawal about Marimo, a reusable and reproducible Python notebook environmentInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Can you describe what Marimo is and the story behind it?What are the core problems and use cases that you are focused on addressing with Marimo?What are you explicitly not trying to solve for with Marimo?Programmatic notebooks have been around for decades now. Jupyter was largely responsible for making them popular outside of academia. How have the applications of notebooks changed in recent years?What are the limitations that have been most challenging to address in production contexts?Jupyter has long had support for multi-language notebooks/notebook kernels. What is your opinion on the utility of that feature as a core concern of the notebook system?Beyond notebooks, Streamlit and Hex have become quite popular for publishing the results of notebook-style analysis. How would you characterize the feature set of Marimo for those use cases?For a typical data team that is working across data pipelines, business analytics, ML/AI engineering, etc. How do you see Marimo applied within and across those contexts?One of the common difficulties with notebooks is that they are largely a single-player experience. They may connect into a shared compute cluster for scaling up execution (e.g. Ray, Dask, etc.). How does Marimo address the situation where a data platform team wants to offer notebooks as a service to reduce the friction to getting started with analyzing data in a warehouse/lakehouse context?How are you seeing teams integrate Marimo with orchestrators (e.g. Dagster, Airflow, Prefect)?What are some of the most interesting or complex engineering challenges that you have had to address while building and evolving Marimo?\What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Marimo used?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Marimo?When is Marimo the wrong choice?What do you have planned for the future of Marimo?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 MarimoJupyterIPythonStreamlitPodcast.init EpisodeVector EmbeddingsDimensionality ReductionKagglePytestPEP 723 script dependency metadataMatLabVisicalcMathematicaRMarkdownRShinyElixir LivebookDatabricks NotebooksPapermillPluto - Julia NotebookHexDirected Acyclic Graph (DAG)Sumble Kaggle founder Anthony Goldblum's startupRayDaskJupytextnbdevDuckDBPodcast EpisodeIcebergSupersetjupyter-marimo-proxyJupyterHubBinderNixAnyWidgetJupyter WidgetsMatplotlibAltairPlotlyDataFusionPolarsMotherDuckThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

In this season of the Analytics Engineering podcast, Tristan is deep into the world of developer tools and databases. If you're following us here, you've almost definitely used Amazon S3 it and its Blob Storage siblings. They form the foundation for nearly all data work in the cloud. In many ways, it was the innovations that happened inside of S3 that have unlocked all of the progress in cloud data over the last decade. In this episode, Tristan talks with Andy Warfield, VP and senior principal engineer at AWS, where he focuses primarily on storage. They go deep on S3, how it works, and what it unlocks. They close out italking about Iceberg, S3 table buckets, and what this all suggests about the outlines of the S3 product roadmap moving forward. 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.

Madison Schott joins me to chat about about her journey from working as an analytics engineer to creating content about dbt, SQL, data modeling, and more.

For the past decade, SQL has reigned king of the data transformation world, and tools like dbt have formed a cornerstone of the modern data stack. Until recently, Python-first alternatives couldn't compete with the scale and performance of modern SQL. Now Ibis can provide the same benefits of SQL execution with a flexible Python dataframe API.

In this talk, you will learn how Ibis supercharges existing open-source libraries like Kedro and Pandera and how you can combine these technologies (and a few more) to build and orchestrate scalable data engineering pipelines without sacrificing the comfort (and other advantages) of Python.

Are you tired of manual and failing dbt deployments? This talk explores how CI/CD and IaC can revolutionize your data transformation workflows, enhancing collaboration and data quality within your dbt projects. Learn the core concepts of CI/CD, including automated testing and deployment pipelines, I will guide you through building a CI/CD pipeline for dbt, triggering it with code changes and running comprehensive tests. Next to that we will dive into Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and how it automates dbt Cloud deployments using tools like Terraform. You will gain practical knowledge for automating dbt Cloud resources, projects, and environments. As a bonus we will do a sneak peek into the recently announced dbt Fusion engine.

We strive for our dbt project to be ready by 9am for our stakeholders. Should be easy, right? Except that our dbt project consists of around 450 dbt models and over 30 sources. Some of those sources are ready as early as midnight but some as late as 4am, and in total our project takes around 4 hours to run. Join as us we walk through the evolution of our dbt run setup, from one selector, to a set of parallel commands, to today's setup -- a dynamic lineage in Airflow which runs models when and only when the upstream source is ready. It's finished when the Tableau datasource is refreshed and our stakeholders can start their day with the latest data.

In today’s dynamic data environments, tables and schemas are constantly evolving and keeping semantic layers up to date has become a critical operational challenge. Manual updates don’t scale, and delays can quickly lead to broken dashboards, failed pipelines, and lost trust. We’ll show how to harness Apache Airflow 3 and its new event-driven scheduling capabilities to automate the entire lifecycle: detecting table and schema changes in real time, parsing and interpreting those changes, and shifting left the updating of semantic models across dbt, Looker, or custom metadata layers. AI agents will add intelligence and automation that rationalize schema diffs, assess impact of changes, and propose targeted updates to semantic layers reducing manual work and minimizing the risk of errors. We’ll dive into strategies for efficient change detection, safe incremental updates, and orchestrating workflows where humans collaborate with AI agents to validate and deploy changes. By the end of the session, you’ll understand how to build resilient, self-healing semantic layers that minimize downtime, reduce manual intervention, and scale effortlessly across fast-changing data environments.

Efficiently handling long-running workflows is crucial for scaling modern data pipelines. Apache Airflow’s deferrable operators help offload tasks during idle periods — freeing worker slots while tracking progress. This session explores how Cosmos 1.9 ( https://github.com/astronomer/astronomer-cosmos ) integrates Airflow’s deferrable capabilities to enhance orchestrating dbt ( https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core ) in production, with insights from recent contributions that introduced this functionality. Key takeaways: Deferrable Operators: How they work and why they’re ideal for long-running dbt tasks. Integrating with Cosmos: Refactoring and enhancements to enable deferrable behaviour across platforms. Performance Gains: Resource savings and task throughput improvements from deferrable execution. Challenges & Future Enhancements: Lessons learned, compatibility, and ideas for broader support. Whether orchestrating dbt models on a cloud warehouse or managing large-scale transformations, this session offers practical strategies to reduce resource contention and boost pipeline performance.

In this talk, I’ll walk through how we built an end-to-end analytics pipeline using open-source tools ( Airbyte, dbt, Airflow, and Metabase). At WirePick, we extract data from multiple sources using Airbyte OSS into PostgreSQL, transform it into business-specific data marts with dbt, and automate the entire workflow using Airflow. Our Metabase dashboards provide real-time insights, and we integrate Slack notifications to alert stakeholders when key business metrics change. This session will cover: Data extraction: Using Airbyte OSS to pull data from multiple sources Transformation & Modeling: How dbt helps create reusable data marts Automation & Orchestration: Managing the workflow with Airflow Data-driven decision-making: Delivering insights through Metabase & Slack alerts

This session showcases Okta’s innovative approach to data pipeline orchestration with dbt and Airflow. How we’ve implemented dynamically generated airflow dags workflows based on dbt’s dependency graph. This allows us to enforce strict data quality standards by automatically executing downstream model tests before upstream model deployments, effectively preventing error cascades. The entire CI/CD pipeline, from dbt model changes to production DAG deployment, is fully automated. The result? Accelerated development cycles, reduced operational overhead, and bulletproof data reliability

Traditional time-based scheduling in Airflow can lead to inefficiencies and delays. With Airflow 3.0, we can now leverage native event-driven DAG execution, enabling workflows to trigger instantly when data arrives—eliminating polling-based sensors and rigid schedules. This talk explores real-time orchestration using Airflow 3.0 and Google Cloud Pub/Sub. We’ll showcase how to build an event-driven pipeline where DAGs automatically trigger as new data lands, ensuring faster and more efficient processing. Through a live demo, we’ll demonstrate how Airflow listens to Pub/Sub messages and dynamically triggers dbt transformations only when fresh data is available. This approach improves scalability, reduces costs, and enhances orchestration efficiency. Key Takeaways: How event-driven DAGs work vs. traditional scheduling, Best practices for integrating Airflow with Pub/Sub,Eliminating polling-based sensors for efficiency,Live demo: Event-driven pipeline with Airflow 3.0, Pub/Sub & dbt. This session will showcase how Airflow 3.0 enables truly real-time orchestration.

Vinted is the biggest second-hand marketplace in Europe with multiple business verticals. Our data ecosystem has over 20 decentralized teams responsible for generating, transforming, and building Data Products from petabytes of data. This creates a daring environment where inter-team dependencies, varied expertise with scheduling tools, and diverse use cases need to be managed efficiently. To tackle these challenges, we have centralized our approach by leveraging Apache Airflow to orchestrate data dependencies across teams. In this session, we will present how we utilize a code generator to streamline the creation of Airflow code for numerous dbt repositories, dockerized jobs, and Vertex-AI pipelines. With this approach, we simplify the complexity and offer our users the flexibility required to accommodate their use cases. We will share our sensor-callback strategy, which we developed to manage task dependencies, overcoming the limitations of traditional dataset triggers. This approach requires a data asset registry to monitor global dependencies and SLOs, and serves as a safeguard during CI processes for detecting potential breaking changes.

As data workloads grow in complexity, teams need seamless orchestration to manage pipelines across batch, streaming, and AI/ML workflows. Apache Airflow provides a flexible and open-source way to orchestrate Databricks’ entire platform, from SQL analytics with Materialized Views (MVs) and Streaming Tables (STs) to AI/ML model training and deployment. In this session, we’ll showcase how Airflow can automate and optimize Databricks workflows, reducing costs and improving performance for large-scale data processing. We’ll highlight how MVs and STs eliminate manual incremental logic, enable real-time ingestion, and enhance query performance—all while maintaining governance and flexibility. Additionally, we’ll demonstrate how Airflow simplifies ML model lifecycle management by integrating Databricks’ AI/ML capabilities into end-to-end data pipelines. Whether you’re a dbt user seeking better performance, a data engineer managing streaming pipelines, or an ML practitioner scaling AI workloads, this session will provide actionable insights on using Airflow and Databricks together to build efficient, cost-effective, and future-proof data platforms.

As data workloads grow in complexity, teams need seamless orchestration to manage pipelines across batch, streaming, and AI/ML workflows. Apache Airflow provides a flexible and open-source way to orchestrate Databricks’ entire platform, from SQL analytics with Materialized Views (MVs) and Streaming Tables (STs) to AI/ML model training and deployment. In this session, we’ll showcase how Airflow can automate and optimize Databricks workflows, reducing costs and improving performance for large-scale data processing. We’ll highlight how MVs and STs eliminate manual incremental logic, enable real-time ingestion, and enhance query performance—all while maintaining governance and flexibility. Additionally, we’ll demonstrate how Airflow simplifies ML model lifecycle management by integrating Databricks’ AI/ML capabilities into end-to-end data pipelines. Whether you’re a dbt user seeking better performance, a data engineer managing streaming pipelines, or an ML practitioner scaling AI workloads, this session will provide actionable insights on using Airflow and Databricks together to build efficient, cost-effective, and future-proof data platforms.