CHG Healthcare migrated 2000+ legacy MySQL jobs to dbt Cloud and Snowflake in record time. We'll share how Datafold used their AI-powered Migration Agent to migrate and refactor convoluted legacy code into dbt Cloud and Snowflake with full automatic validation, dramatically accelerating our modernization.

In this session, Gleb Mezhanskiy, CEO of Datafold, will share innovative strategies for automating the conversion of legacy transformation code (i.e., stored procedures) to dbt models, a crucial step in modernizing your data infrastructure. He will also delve into techniques for automating the data reconciliation between legacy and new systems with cross-database data diffing, ensuring data integrity and accelerating migration timelines. Additionally, Gleb will demonstrate how data teams can adopt a proactive approach to data quality post-migration by leveraging a "shift-left" approach to data testing and monitoring.

Speaker: Gleb Mezhanskiy Datafold

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Join the team from Moody's Analytics as they take you on a personal journey of optimizing their data pipelines for data quality and governance. Like many data practitioners, Ryan and Ravi understand the frustration and anxiety that comes with accidentally introducing bad code into production pipelines—they've spent countless hours putting out fires caused from these unexpected changes.

In this session, Ryan and Ravi recount their experiences with a previous data stack that lacked standardized testing methods and visibility into the impact of code changes on production data. They also share how their new data stack is safeguarded by Datafold's data diffing and continuous integration (CI) capabilities, which enables their team to work with greater confidence, peace of mind, and speed.

Speakers: Gleb Mezhanskiy, CEO, Datafold; Ravi Ramadoss, Director of Data Engineering, Moody's Analytics CRE; Ryan Kelly, Data Engineer, Moody's Analytics CRE

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Summary

All software systems are in a constant state of evolution. This makes it impossible to select a truly future-proof technology stack for your data platform, making an eventual migration inevitable. In this episode Gleb Mezhanskiy and Rob Goretsky share their experiences leading various data platform migrations, and the hard-won lessons that they learned so that you don't have to.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Introducing RudderStack Profiles. RudderStack Profiles takes the SaaS guesswork and SQL grunt work out of building complete customer profiles so you can quickly ship actionable, enriched data to every downstream team. You specify the customer traits, then Profiles runs the joins and computations for you to create complete customer profiles. Get all of the details and try the new product today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack Modern data teams are using Hex to 10x their data impact. Hex combines a notebook style UI with an interactive report builder. This allows data teams to both dive deep to find insights and then share their work in an easy-to-read format to the whole org. In Hex you can use SQL, Python, R, and no-code visualization together to explore, transform, and model data. Hex also has AI built directly into the workflow to help you generate, edit, explain and document your code. The best data teams in the world such as the ones at Notion, AngelList, and Anthropic use Hex for ad hoc investigations, creating machine learning models, and building operational dashboards for the rest of their company. Hex makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to collaborate together and produce work that has an impact. Make your data team unstoppable with Hex. Sign up today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hex to get a 30-day free trial for your team! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Gleb Mezhanskiy and Rob Goretsky about when and how to think about migrating your data stack

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? A migration can be anything from a minor task to a major undertaking. Can you start by describing what constitutes a migration for the purposes of this conversation? Is it possible to completely avoid having to invest in a migration? What are the signals that point to the need for a migration?

What are some of the sources of cost that need to be accounted for when considering a migration? (both in terms of doing one, and the costs of not doing one) What are some signals that a migration is not the right solution for a perceived problem?

Once the decision has been made that a migration is necessary, what are the questions that the team should be asking to determine the technologies to move to and the sequencing of execution? What are the preceding tasks that should be completed before starting the migration to ensure there is no breakage downstream of the changing component(s)? What are some of the ways that a migration effort might fail? What are the major pitfalls that teams need to be aware of as they work through a data platform migration? What are the opportunities for automation during the migration process? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen teams approach a platform migration? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on data platform migrations? What are some ways that the technologies and patterns that we use can be evolved to reduce the cost/impact/need for migraitons?

Contact Info

Gleb

LinkedIn @glebmm on Twitter

Rob

LinkedIn RobGoretsky on GitHub

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

Datafold

Podcast Episode

Informatica Airflow Snowflake

Podcast Episode

Redshift Eventbrite Teradata BigQuery Trino EMR == Elastic Map-Reduce Shadow IT

Podcast Episode

Mode Analytics Looker Sunk Cost Fallacy data-diff

Podcast Episode

SQLGlot Dagster dbt

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

Hex is a collaborative workspace for data science and analytics. A single place for teams to explore, transform, and visualize data into beautiful interactive reports. Use SQL, Python, R, no-code and AI to find and share insights across your organization. Empower everyone in an organization to make an impact with data. Sign up today at [dataengineeringpodcast.com/hex](https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/hex} and get 30 days free!Rudderstack:

Introducing RudderStack Profiles. RudderStack Profiles takes the SaaS guesswork and SQL grunt work out of building complete customer profiles so you can quickly ship actionable, enriched data to every downstream team. You specify the customer traits, then Profiles runs the joins and computations for you to create complete customer profiles. Get all of the details and try the new product today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstackSupport Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

Data engineering is all about building workflows, pipelines, systems, and interfaces to provide stable and reliable data. Your data can be stable and wrong, but then it isn't reliable. Confidence in your data is achieved through constant validation and testing. Datafold has invested a lot of time into integrating with the workflow of dbt projects to add early verification that the changes you are making are correct. In this episode Gleb Mezhanskiy shares some valuable advice and insights into how you can build reliable and well-tested data assets with dbt and data-diff.

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 Gleb Mezhanskiy about how to test your dbt projects with Datafold

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Datafold is and what's new since we last spoke? (July 2021 and July 2022 about data-diff) What are the roadblocks to data testing/validation that you see teams run into most often?

How does the tooling used contribute to/help address those roadblocks?

What are some of the error conditions/failure modes that data-diff can help identify in a dbt project?

What are some examples of tests that need to be implemented by the engineer?

In your experience working with data teams, what typically constitutes the "staging area" for a dbt project? (e.g. separate warehouse, namespaced tables, snowflake data copies, lakefs, etc.) Given a dbt project that is well tested and has data-diff as part of the validation suite, what are the challenges that teams face in managing the feedback cycle of running those tests? In application development there is the idea of the "testing pyramid", consisting of unit tests, integration tests, system tests, etc. What are the parallels to that in data projects?

What are the limitations of the data ecosystem that make testing a bigger challenge than it might otherwise be?

Beyond test execution, what are the other aspects of data health that need to be included in the development and deployment workflow of dbt projects? (e.g. freshness, time to delivery, etc.) What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Datafold and/or data-diff used for testing dbt projects? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on dbt testing internally or with your customers? When is Datafold/data-diff the wrong choice for dbt projects? What do you have planned for the future of Datafold?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

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

Parting Question

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

Links

Datafold

Podcast Episode

data-diff

Podcast Episode

db

Summary This has been an active year for the data ecosystem, with a number of new product categories and substantial growth in existing areas. In an attempt to capture the zeitgeist Maura Church, David Wallace, Benn Stancil, and Gleb Mezhanskiy join the show to reflect on the past year and share their thought son the year to come.

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 Maura Church, David Wallace, Benn Stancil, and Gleb Mezhanskiy about the key themes of 2021 in the data ecosystem and what to expect for next year

Interview

Introduction

How did you get involved in the area of data management?

What were the main themes that you saw data practitioners and vendors focused on this year?

What is the major bottleneck for Data teams in 2021? Will it be the same in 2022? One of the ways to reason about progress in any domain is to look at what was the primary bottleneck of further progress (data adoption for decision making) at different points in time. In the data domain, we have seen a number of bottlenecks, for example, scaling data platforms, the answer to which was Hadoop and on-prem columnar stores and then cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake & BigQuery. Then the problem was data integration and transformation which was solved by data integration vendors and frameworks such as Fivetran / Airbyte, modern orchestration frameworks such as Dagster & dbt and “reverse-ETL” Hightouch. What is the main challenge now?

Will SQL be challenged as a primary interface to analytical data? In 2020 we’ve seen a few launches of post-SQL languages such as Malloy, Preql, metric layer query languages from Transform and Supergrain.

To what extent does speed matter? Over the past

Summary Data quality is a concern that has been gaining attention alongside the rising importance of analytics for business success. Many solutions rely on hand-coded rules for catching known bugs, or statistical analysis of records to detect anomalies retroactively. While those are useful tools, it is far better to prevent data errors before they become an outsized issue. In this episode Gleb Mezhanskiy shares some strategies for adding quality checks at every stage of your development and deployment workflow to identify and fix problematic changes to your data before they get to production.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management You listen to this show to learn about all of the latest tools, patterns, and practices that power data engineering projects across every domain. Now there’s a book that captures the foundational lessons and principles that underly everything that you hear about here. I’m happy to announce I collected wisdom from the community to help you in your journey as a data engineer and worked with O’Reilly to publish it as 97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/97things today to get your copy! 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! RudderStack’s smart customer data pipeline is warehouse-first. It builds your customer data warehouse and your identity graph on your data warehouse, with support for Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and more. Their SDKs and plugins make event streaming easy, and their integrations with cloud applications like Salesforce and ZenDesk help you go beyond event streaming. With RudderStack you can use all of your customer data to answer more difficult questions and then send those insights to your whole customer data stack. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder today. We’ve all been asked to help with an ad-hoc request for data by the sales and marketing team. Then it becomes a critical report that they need updated every week or every day. Then what do you do? Send a CSV via email? Write some Python scripts to automate it? But what about incremental sync, API quotas, error handling, and all of the other details that eat up your time? Today, there is a better way. With Census, just write SQL or plug in your dbt models and start syncing your cloud warehouse to SaaS applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and many more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/census today to get a free 14-day trial. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Gleb Mezhanskiy about strategies for proactive data quality management and his work at Datafold to help provide tools for implementing them

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what you are building at Datafold and the story behind it? What are the biggest factors that you see contributing to data quality issues?

How are teams identifying and addressing those failures?

How does the data platform architecture impact the potential for introducing quality problems? What are some of the potential risks or consequences of introducing errors in data processing? How can organizations shift to being proactive in their data quality management?

How much of a role does tooling play in addressing the introduct