Summary The team at Sentry has built a platform for anyone in the world to send software errors and events. As they scaled the volume of customers and data they began running into the limitations of their initial architecture. To address the needs of their business and continue to improve their capabilities they settled on Clickhouse as the new storage and query layer to power their business. In this episode James Cunningham and Ted Kaemming describe the process of rearchitecting a production system, what they learned in the process, and some useful tips for anyone else evaluating Clickhouse.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, Corinium Global Intelligence, Alluxio, and Data Council. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ted Kaemming and James Cunningham about Snuba, the new open source search service at Sentry implemented on top of Clickhouse

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing the internal and user-facing issues that you were facing at Sentry with the existing search capabilities?

What did the previous system look like?

What was your design criteria for building a new platform?

What was your initial list of possible system components and what was your evaluation process that resulted in your selection of Clickhouse?

Can you describe the system architecture of Snuba and some of the ways that it differs from your initial ideas of how it would work?

What have been some of the sharp edges of Clickhouse that you have had to engineer around? How have you found the operational aspects of Clickhouse?

How did you manage the introduction of this new piece of infrastructure to a business that was already handling massive amounts of real-time data? What are some of the downstream benefits of using Clickhouse for managing event data at Sentry? For someone who is interested in using Snuba for their own purposes, how flexible is it for different domain contexts? What are some of the other data challenges that you are currently facing at Sentry?

What is your next highest priority for evolving or rebuilding to address technical or business challenges?

Contact Info

James

@JTCunning on Twitter JTCunning on GitHub

Ted

tkaemming on GitHub Website @tkaemming 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 show, Podcast.init to learn about the Python language, its community, and t

Summary With the constant evolution of technology for data management it can seem impossible to make an informed decision about whether to build a data warehouse, or a data lake, or just leave your data wherever it currently rests. What’s worse is that any time you have to migrate to a new architecture, all of your analytical code has to change too. Thankfully it’s possible to add an abstraction layer to eliminate the churn in your client code, allowing you to evolve your data platform without disrupting your downstream data users. In this episode AtScale co-founder and CTO Matthew Baird describes how the data virtualization and data engineering automation capabilities that are built into the platform free up your engineers to focus on your business needs without having to waste cycles on premature optimization. This was a great conversation about the power of abstractions and appreciating the value of increasing the efficiency of your 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 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! This week’s episode is also sponsored by Datacoral, an AWS-native, serverless, data infrastructure that installs in your VPC. Datacoral helps data engineers build and manage the flow of data pipelines without having to manage any infrastructure, meaning you can spend your time invested in data transformations and business needs, rather than pipeline maintenance. Raghu Murthy, founder and CEO of Datacoral built data infrastructures at Yahoo! and Facebook, scaling from terabytes to petabytes of analytic data. He started Datacoral with the goal to make SQL the universal data programming language. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datacoral today to find out more. Having all of your logs and event data in one place makes your life easier when something breaks, unless that something is your Elastic Search cluster because it’s storing too much data. CHAOSSEARCH frees you from having to worry about data retention, unexpected failures, and expanding operating costs. They give you a fully managed service to search and analyze all of your logs in S3, entirely under your control, all for half the cost of running your own Elastic Search cluster or using a hosted platform. Try it out for yourself at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chaossearch and don’t forget to thank them for supporting the show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, Corinium Global Intelligence, Alluxio, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum, the Data Orchestration Summit, and Data Council in NYC. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Matt Baird about AtScale, a platform that

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing the AtScale platform and how it fits in the ecosystem of data tools? What was your motivation for building the platform and what were some of the early challenges that you faced in achieving your current level of success? How is the AtScale platform architected and what have been some of the main areas of evolution and change since you first began building it?

How has the surrounding data ecosystem changed since AtScale was founded? How are current industry trends influencing your product focus?

Can you talk through the workflow for someone implementing AtScale? What are some of the main use cases that benefit from data virtualization capabilities?

How does it influence the relevancy of data warehouses or data lakes?

What are some of the types of tools or patterns that AtScale replaces in a data platform? What are some of the most interesting or unexpected ways that you have seen AtScale used? What have been some of the most challenging aspects of building and growing the platform? When is AtScale the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of the platform and business?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @zetty 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 show, Podcast.init to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat

Links

AtScale PeopleSoft Oracle Hadoop PrestoDB Impala Apache Kylin Apache Druid Go Language Scala

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Building Big Data Applications helps data managers and their organizations make the most of unstructured data with an existing data warehouse. It provides readers with what they need to know to make sense of how Big Data fits into the world of Data Warehousing. Readers will learn about infrastructure options and integration and come away with a solid understanding on how to leverage various architectures for integration. The book includes a wide range of use cases that will help data managers visualize reference architectures in the context of specific industries (healthcare, big oil, transportation, software, etc.). Explores various ways to leverage Big Data by effectively integrating it into the data warehouse Includes real-world case studies which clearly demonstrate Big Data technologies Provides insights on how to optimize current data warehouse infrastructure and integrate newer infrastructure matching data processing workloads and requirements

Work with petabyte-scale datasets while building a collaborative, agile workplace in the process. This practical book is the canonical reference to Google BigQuery, the query engine that lets you conduct interactive analysis of large datasets. BigQuery enables enterprises to efficiently store, query, ingest, and learn from their data in a convenient framework. With this book, you’ll examine how to analyze data at scale to derive insights from large datasets efficiently. Valliappa Lakshmanan, tech lead for Google Cloud Platform, and Jordan Tigani, engineering director for the BigQuery team, provide best practices for modern data warehousing within an autoscaled, serverless public cloud. Whether you want to explore parts of BigQuery you’re not familiar with or prefer to focus on specific tasks, this reference is indispensable.

Summary The scale and complexity of the systems that we build to satisfy business requirements is increasing as the available tools become more sophisticated. In order to bridge the gap between legacy infrastructure and evolving use cases it is necessary to create a unifying set of components. In this episode Dipti Borkar explains how the emerging category of data orchestration tools fills this need, some of the existing projects that fit in this space, and some of the ways that they can work together to simplify projects such as cloud migration and hybrid cloud environments. It is always useful to get a broad view of new trends in the industry and this was a helpful perspective on the need to provide mechanisms to decouple physical storage from computing capacity.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! This week’s episode is also sponsored by Datacoral, an AWS-native, serverless, data infrastructure that installs in your VPC. Datacoral helps data engineers build and manage the flow of data pipelines without having to manage any infrastructure, meaning you can spend your time invested in data transformations and business needs, rather than pipeline maintenance. Raghu Murthy, founder and CEO of Datacoral built data infrastructures at Yahoo! and Facebook, scaling from terabytes to petabytes of analytic data. He started Datacoral with the goal to make SQL the universal data programming language. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datacoral today to find out more. You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, Corinium Global Intelligence, Alluxio, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum, the Data Orchestration Summit, and Data Council in NYC. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Dipti Borkark about data orchestration and how it helps in migrating data workloads to the cloud

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what you mean by the term "Data Orchestration"?

How does it compare to the concept of "Data Virtualization"? What are some of the tools and platforms that fit under that umbrella?

What are some of the motivations for organizations to use the cloud for their data oriented workloads?

What are they giving up by using cloud resources in place of on-premises compute?

For businesses that have invested heavily in their own datacenters, what are some ways that they can begin to replicate some of the benefits of cloud environments? What are some of the common patterns for cloud migration projects and what challenges do they present?

Do you have advice on useful metrics to track for determining project completion or success criteria?

How do businesses approach employee education for designing and implementing effective systems for achieving their migration goals? Can you talk through some of the ways that different data orchestration tools can be composed together for a cloud migration effort?

What are some of the common pain points that organizations encounter when working on hybrid implementations?

What are some of the missing pieces in the data orchestration landscape?

Are there any efforts that you are aware of that are aiming to fill those gaps?

Where is the data orchestration market heading, and what are some industry trends that are driving it?

What projects are you most interested in or excited by?

For someone who wants to learn more about data orchestration and the benefits the technologies can provide, what are some resources that you would recommend?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @dborkar 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 show, Podcast.init to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat

Links

Alluxio

Podcast Episode

UC San Diego Couchbase Presto

Podcast Episode

Spark SQL Data Orchestration Data Virtualization PyTorch

Podcast.init Episode

Rook storage orchestration PySpark MinIO

Podcast Episode

Kubernetes Openstack Hadoop HDFS Parquet Files

Podcast Episode

ORC Files Hive Metastore Iceberg Table Format

Podcast Episode

Data Orchestration Summit Star Schema Snowflake Schema Data Warehouse Data Lake Teradata

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary Managing a data warehouse can be challenging, especially when trying to maintain a common set of patterns. Dataform is a platform that helps you apply engineering principles to your data transformations and table definitions, including unit testing SQL scripts, defining repeatable pipelines, and adding metadata to your warehouse to improve your team’s communication. In this episode CTO and co-founder of Dataform Lewis Hemens joins the show to explain his motivation for creating the platform and company, how it works under the covers, and how you can start using it today to get your data warehouse under control.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! This week’s episode is also sponsored by Datacoral. They provide an AWS-native, serverless, data infrastructure that installs in your VPC. Datacoral helps data engineers build and manage the flow of data pipelines without having to manage any infrastructure. Datacoral’s customers report that their data engineers are able to spend 80% of their work time invested in data transformations, rather than pipeline maintenance. Raghu Murthy, founder and CEO of Datacoral built data infrastructures at Yahoo! and Facebook, scaling from mere terabytes to petabytes of analytic data. He started Datacoral with the goal to make SQL the universal data programming language. Visit Datacoral.com today to find out more. Are you working on data, analytics, or AI using platforms such as Presto, Spark, or Tensorflow? Check out the Data Orchestration Summit on November 7 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This one day conference is focused on the key data engineering challenges and solutions around building analytics and AI platforms. Attendees will hear from companies including Walmart, Netflix, Google, and DBS Bank on how they leveraged technologies such as Alluxio, Presto, Spark, Tensorflow, and you will also hear from creators of open source projects including Alluxio, Presto, Airflow, Iceberg, and more! Use discount code PODCAST for 25% off of your ticket, and the first five people to register get free tickets! Register now as early bird tickets are ending this week! Attendees will takeaway learnings, swag, a free voucher to visit the museum, and a chance to win the latest ipad Pro! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, Corinium Global Intelligence, Alluxio, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum, the Data Orchestration Summit, and Data Council in NYC. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Lewis Hemens about DataForm, a platform that helps analy

Leverage the power of SQL Server 2017 Integration Services to build data integration solutions with ease Key Features Work with temporal tables to access information stored in a table at any time Get familiar with the latest features in SQL Server 2017 Integration Services Program and extend your packages to enhance their functionality Book Description Microsoft SQL Server 2017 uses the power of R and Python for machine learning and containerization-based deployment on Windows and Linux. By learning how to use the features of SQL Server 2017 effectively, you can build scalable apps and easily perform data integration and transformation. You'll start by brushing up on the features of SQL Server 2017. This Learning Path will then demonstrate how you can use Query Store, columnstore indexes, and In-Memory OLTP in your apps. You'll also learn to integrate Python code in SQL Server and graph database implementations for development and testing. Next, you'll get up to speed with designing and building SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) data warehouse packages using SQL server data tools. Toward the concluding chapters, you'll discover how to develop SSIS packages designed to maintain a data warehouse using the data flow and other control flow tasks. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be equipped with the skills you need to design efficient, high-performance database applications with confidence. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: SQL Server 2017 Developer's Guide by Milos Radivojevic, Dejan Sarka, et. al SQL Server 2017 Integration Services Cookbook by Christian Cote, Dejan Sarka, et. al What you will learn Use columnstore indexes to make storage and performance improvements Extend database design solutions using temporal tables Exchange JSON data between applications and SQL Server Migrate historical data to Microsoft Azure by using Stretch Database Design the architecture of a modern Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) solution Implement ETL solutions using Integration Services for both on-premise and Azure data Who this book is for This Learning Path is for database developers and solution architects looking to develop ETL solutions with SSIS, and explore the new features in SSIS 2017. Advanced analysis practitioners, business intelligence developers, and database consultants dealing with performance tuning will also find this book useful. Basic understanding of database concepts and T-SQL is required to get the best out of this Learning Path.

Summary The extract and load pattern of data replication is the most commonly needed process in data engineering workflows. Because of the myriad sources and destinations that are available, it is also among the most difficult tasks that we encounter. Fivetran is a platform that does the hard work for you and replicates information from your source systems into whichever data warehouse you use. In this episode CEO and co-founder George Fraser explains how it is built, how it got started, and the challenges that creep in at the edges when dealing with so many disparate systems that need to be made to work together. This is a great conversation to listen to for a better understanding of the challenges inherent in synchronizing your data.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management.For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and Corinium Global Intelligence. Upcoming events include the O’Reilly AI Conference, the Strata Data Conference, and the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing George Fraser about FiveTran, a hosted platform for replicating your data from source to destination

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing the problem that Fivetran solves and the story of how it got started? Integration of multiple data sources (e.g. entity resolution) How is Fivetran architected and how has the overall system design changed since you first began working on it? monitoring and alerting Automated schema normalization. How does it work for customized data sources? Managing schema drift while avoiding data loss Change data capture What have you found to be the most complex or challenging data sources to work with reliably? Workflow for users getting started with Fivetran When is Fivetran the wrong choice for collecting and analyzing your data? What have you found to be the most challenging aspects of working in the space of data integrations?}} What have been the most interesting/unexpected/useful lessons that you have learned while building and growing Fivetran? What do you have planned for the future of Fivetran?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @frasergeorgew on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

Data professionals are confronting the most disruptive change since relational databases appeared in the 1980s. SQL is still a major tool for data analytics, but conventional relational database management systems can’t handle the increasing size and complexity of today’s datasets. This updated edition teaches you best practices for Greenplum Database, the open source massively parallel processing (MPP) database that accommodates large sets of nonrelational and relational data. Marshall Presser, field CTO at Pivotal, introduces Greenplum’s approach to data analytics and data-driven decisions, beginning with its shared-nothing architecture. IT managers, developers, data analysts, system architects, and data scientists will all gain from exploring data organization and storage, data loading, running queries, and learning to perform analytics in the database. Discover how MPP and Greenplum will help you go beyond the traditional data warehouse. This ebook covers: Greenplum features, use case examples, and techniques for optimizing use Four Greenplum deployment options to help you balance security, cost, and time to usability Why each networked node in Greenplum’s architecture includes an independent operating system, memory, and storage Additional tools for monitoring, managing, securing, and optimizing query responses in the Pivotal Greenplum commercial database

Summary The market for data warehouse platforms is large and varied, with options for every use case. ClickHouse is an open source, column-oriented database engine built for interactive analytics with linear scalability. In this episode Robert Hodges and Alexander Zaitsev explain how it is architected to provide these features, the various unique capabilities that it provides, and how to run it in production. It was interesting to learn about some of the custom data types and performance optimizations that are included.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Integrating data across the enterprise has been around for decades – so have the techniques to do it. But, a new way of integrating data and improving streams has evolved. By integrating each silo independently – data is able to integrate without any direct relation. At CluedIn they call it “eventual connectivity”. If you want to learn more on how to deliver fast access to your data across the enterprise leveraging this new method, and the technologies that make it possible, get a demo or presentation of the CluedIn Data Hub by visiting dataengineeringpodcast.com/cluedin. And don’t forget to thank them for supporting the show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management.For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Coming up this fall is the combined events of Graphorum and the Data Architecture Summit. The agendas have been announced and super early bird registration for up to $300 off is available until July 26th, with early bird pricing for up to $200 off through August 30th. Use the code BNLLC to get an additional 10% off any pass when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Robert Hodges and Alexander Zaitsev about Clickhouse, an open source, column-oriented database for fast and scalable OLAP queries

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Clickhouse is and how you each got involved with it?

What are the primary use cases that Clickhouse is targeting? Where does it fit in the database market and how does it compare to other column stores, both open source and commercial?

Can you describe how Clickhouse is architected? Can you talk through the lifecycle of a given record or set of records from when they first get inserted into Clickhouse, through the engine an

Summary In recent years the traditional approach to building data warehouses has shifted from transforming records before loading, to transforming them afterwards. As a result, the tooling for those transformations needs to be reimagined. The data build tool (dbt) is designed to bring battle tested engineering practices to your analytics pipelines. By providing an opinionated set of best practices it simplifies collaboration and boosts confidence in your data teams. In this episode Drew Banin, creator of dbt, explains how it got started, how it is designed, and how you can start using it today to create reliable and well-tested reports in your favorite data warehouse.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Understanding how your customers are using your product is critical for businesses of any size. To make it easier for startups to focus on delivering useful features Segment offers a flexible and reliable data infrastructure for your customer analytics and custom events. You only need to maintain one integration to instrument your code and get a future-proof way to send data to over 250 services with the flip of a switch. Not only does it free up your engineers’ time, it lets your business users decide what data they want where. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/segmentio today to sign up for their startup plan and get $25,000 in Segment credits and $1 million in free software from marketing and analytics companies like AWS, Google, and Intercom. On top of that you’ll get access to Analytics Academy for the educational resources you need to become an expert in data analytics for measuring product-market fit. You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Drew Banin about DBT, the Data Build Tool, a toolkit for building analytics the way that developers build applications

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what DBT is and your motivation for creating it? Where does it fit in the overall landscape of data tools and the lifecycle of data in an analytics pipeline? Can you talk through the workflow for someone using DBT? One of the useful features of DBT for stability of analytics is the ability to write and execute tests. Can you explain how those are implemented? The packaging capabilities are beneficial for enabling collaboration. Can you talk through how the packaging system is implemented?

Are these packages driven by Fishtown Analytics or the dbt community?

What are the limitations of modeling everything as a SELECT statement? Making SQL code reusable is notoriously difficult. How does the Jinja templating of DBT address this issue and what are the shortcomings?

What are your thoughts on higher level approaches to SQL that compile down to the specific statements?

Can you explain how DBT is implemented and how the design has evolved since you first began working on it? What are some of the features of DBT that are often overlooked which you find particularly useful? What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/innovative ways that you have seen DBT used? What are the additional features that the commercial version of DBT provides? What are some of the most useful or challenging lessons that you have learned in the process of building and maintaining DBT? When is it the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of DBT?

Contact Info

Email @drebanin on Twitter drebanin on GitHub

Parting Question

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

Links

DBT Fishtown Analytics 8Tracks Internet Radio Redshift Magento Stitch Data Fivetran Airflow Business Intelligence Jinja template language BigQuery Snowflake Version Control Git Continuous Integration Test Driven Development Snowplow Analytics

Podcast Episode

dbt-utils We Can Do Better Than SQL blog post from EdgeDB EdgeDB Looker LookML

Podcast Interview

Presto DB

Podcast Interview

Spark SQL Hive Azure SQL Data Warehouse Data Warehouse Data Lake Data Council Conference Slowly Changing Dimensions dbt Archival Mode Analytics Periscope BI dbt docs dbt repository

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Just-in-time design is the practice of designing working software in small increments that support a business-defined need or story. Just-in-time design, as well as just-in-time testing, is an integral part of the agile software methodology. In fact, you can’t really do agile without just-in-time design.

To help us understand the nuances of just-in-time design, we invited Aaron Fuller, a long-time data architect and member of Eckerson Group’s consulting network. Across an 11-year career as the enterprise data architect for an insurance company, he modeled data, created technical designs for a broad range of systems, established governance and stewardship, and led the establishment of their enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, and enterprise architecture programs. As principal consultant and owner of Superior Data Strategies since 2010, he leads a team of highly skilled data professionals who are uniquely capable of planning and executing agile data projects.

Over the past 5 years, the concept of big data has matured, data science has grown exponentially, and data architecture has become a standard part of organizational decision-making. Throughout all this change, the basic principles that shape the architecture of data have remained the same. There remains a need for people to take a look at the "bigger picture" and to understand where their data fit into the grand scheme of things. Data Architecture: A Primer for the Data Scientist, Second Edition addresses the larger architectural picture of how big data fits within the existing information infrastructure or data warehousing systems. This is an essential topic not only for data scientists, analysts, and managers but also for researchers and engineers who increasingly need to deal with large and complex sets of data. Until data are gathered and can be placed into an existing framework or architecture, they cannot be used to their full potential. Drawing upon years of practical experience and using numerous examples and case studies from across various industries, the authors seek to explain this larger picture into which big data fits, giving data scientists the necessary context for how pieces of the puzzle should fit together. New case studies include expanded coverage of textual management and analytics New chapters on visualization and big data Discussion of new visualizations of the end-state architecture

Data virtualization has been around for decades and has always been controversial. In the 1990s, it was called virtual data warehousing or VDW-- or as some skeptics liked to say, "voodoo and witchcraft”. It’s also been known as query federation and more recently, data services. The idea is that business users don't need to know the location of the data; they merely need to log into the data service and all data appears as if it’s local to their server, modeled in a fashion that makes sense to them.

Andrew Sohn is the Global Head of Data and Analytics at Crawford & Company, a $1B+ service provider to the insurance and risk management industry, where he designed and leads its data and digital transformation strategy and program. With more than 25 years in the industry, Andrew has managed a broad range of infrastructure and application technologies. He’s a strong advocate of data virtualization technology and believes it is an integral part of a modern, agile data ecosystem.

Intelligent Data Analysis for Biomedical Applications: Challenges and Solutions presents specialized statistical, pattern recognition, machine learning, data abstraction and visualization tools for the analysis of data and discovery of mechanisms that create data. It provides computational methods and tools for intelligent data analysis, with an emphasis on problem-solving relating to automated data collection, such as computer-based patient records, data warehousing tools, intelligent alarming, effective and efficient monitoring, and more. This book provides useful references for educational institutions, industry professionals, researchers, scientists, engineers and practitioners interested in intelligent data analysis, knowledge discovery, and decision support in databases. Provides the methods and tools necessary for intelligent data analysis and gives solutions to problems resulting from automated data collection Contains an analysis of medical databases to provide diagnostic expert systems Addresses the integration of intelligent data analysis techniques within biomedical information systems

The data lake is a daring new approach for harnessing the power of big data technology and providing convenient self-service capabilities. But is it right for your company? This book is based on discussions with practitioners and executives from more than a hundred organizations, ranging from data-driven companies such as Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, to governments and traditional corporate enterprises. You’ll learn what a data lake is, why enterprises need one, and how to build one successfully with the best practices in this book. Alex Gorelik, CTO and founder of Waterline Data, explains why old systems and processes can no longer support data needs in the enterprise. Then, in a collection of essays about data lake implementation, you’ll examine data lake initiatives, analytic projects, experiences, and best practices from data experts working in various industries. Get a succinct introduction to data warehousing, big data, and data science Learn various paths enterprises take to build a data lake Explore how to build a self-service model and best practices for providing analysts access to the data Use different methods for architecting your data lake Discover ways to implement a data lake from experts in different industries

Summary Deep learning is the latest class of technology that is gaining widespread interest. As data engineers we are responsible for building and managing the platforms that power these models. To help us understand what is involved, we are joined this week by Thomas Henson. In this episode he shares his experiences experimenting with deep learning, what data engineers need to know about the infrastructure and data requirements to power the models that your team is building, and how it can be used to supercharge our ETL pipelines.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Managing and auditing access to your servers and databases is a problem that grows in difficulty alongside the growth of your teams. If you are tired of wasting your time cobbling together scripts and workarounds to give your developers, data scientists, and managers the permissions that they need then it’s time to talk to our friends at strongDM. They have built an easy to use platform that lets you leverage your company’s single sign on for your data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/strongdm today to find out how you can simplify your systems. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media. Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data platforms. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss the Strata conference in San Francisco on March 25th and the Artificial Intelligence conference in NYC on April 15th, both run by our friends at O’Reilly Media. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/stratacon and dataengineeringpodcast.com/aicon to register today and get 20% off Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Thomas Henson about what data engineers need to know about deep learning, including how to use it for their own projects

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of what deep learning is for anyone who isn’t familiar with it? What has been your personal experience with deep learning and what set you down that path? What is involved in building a data pipeline and production infrastructure for a deep learning product?

How does that differ from other types of analytics projects such as data warehousing or traditional ML?

For anyone who is in the early stages of a deep learning project, what are some of the edge cases or gotchas that they should be aware of? What are your opinions on the level of involvement/understanding that data engineers should have with the analytical products that are being built with the information we collect and curate? What are some ways that we can use deep learning as part of the data management process?

How does that shift the infrastructure requirements for our platforms?

Cloud providers have b

Immerse yourself in the capabilities of PostgreSQL 11 with this comprehensive beginner's guide. Learning PostgreSQL 11 will take you through relational database fundamentals and advanced database functionality, empowering you to build efficient and scalable database solutions with confidence. By the end of this book, you'll have mastery over PostgreSQL's features to develop, manage, and optimize your own databases. What this Book will help me do Gain a solid understanding of relational database principles and the PostgreSQL ecosystem. Learn to install PostgreSQL, create a database, and design a data model effectively. Develop skills to create, manipulate, and optimize tables, views, and efficient indexes. Utilize server-side programming with PL/pgSQL and advanced data types like JSONB. Enhance database reliability and performance, and connect to your Python applications seamlessly. Author(s) Christopher Travers and None Volkov bring their collective expertise and practical experience to this book. Christopher has a strong background in software development and database systems, with years of hands-on involvement with PostgreSQL. None has contributed significantly to innovative database solutions, emphasizing clear and actionable instructions. Together, they aim to demystify PostgreSQL for learners of all backgrounds. Who is it for? This book is crafted for developers, database administrators, and tech enthusiasts who want to delve into PostgreSQL. Beginners with no prior database experience will find its approach accessible, while those aiming to enhance their skills with PostgreSQL's latest features will benefit immensely. It's ideal for anyone seeking to build solid database or data warehousing applications with modern capabilities and best practices.

Being a change agent is hard. It's tough to inspire people and get them motivated to work on a shared vision. To understand the mechanics of digitalization and tactics required to implement them, Wayne Eckerson invited Andrea Ballinger so that she could share her hard-won lessons from her illustrious career as a technology leader.   Andrea is currently leading a transformation program at LSU, revamping the university’s information technology resources across multiple campuses. Prior to that, she served as Interim CEO and President for the University of Illinois  Alumni Association and CTO of Illinois State University. She began her data career at the University of Illinois where she earned a reputation as the foremost data warehousing expert in higher education.

Summary

Every business needs a pipeline for their critical data, even if it is just pasting into a spreadsheet. As the organization grows and gains more customers, the requirements for that pipeline will change. In this episode Christian Heinzmann, Head of Data Warehousing at Grubhub, discusses the various requirements for data pipelines and how the overall system architecture evolves as more data is being processed. He also covers the changes in how the output of the pipelines are used, how that impacts the expectations for accuracy and availability, and some useful advice on build vs. buy for the components of a data platform.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Christian Heinzmann about how data pipelines evolve as your business grows

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by sharing your definition of a data pipeline?

At what point in the life of a project or organization should you start thinking about building a pipeline?

In the early stages when the scale of the data and business are still small, what are some of the design characteristics that you should be targeting for your pipeline?

What metrics/use cases should you be optimizing for at this point?

What are some of the indicators that you look for to signal that you are reaching the next order of magnitude in terms of scale?

How do the design requirements for a data pipeline change as you reach this stage? What are some of the challenges and complexities that begin to present themselves as you build and run your pipeline at medium scale?

What are some of the changes that are necessary as you move to a large scale data pipeline? At each level of scale it is important to minimize the impact of the ETL process on the source systems. What are some strategies that you have employed to avoid degrading the performance of the application systems? In recent years there has been a shift to using data lakes as a staging ground before performing transformations. What are your thoughts on that approach? When performing transformations there is a potential for discarding information or losing fidelity. How have you worked to reduce the impact of this effect? Transformations of the source data can be brittle when the format or volume changes. How do you design the pipeline to be resilient to these types of changes? What are your selection criteria when determining what workflow or ETL engines to use in your pipeline?

How has your preference of build vs buy changed at different scales of operation and as new/different projects become available?

What are some of the dead ends or edge cases that you have had to deal with in your current role at Grubhub? What are some of the common mistakes or overlooked aspects of building a data pipeline that you have seen? What are your plans for improving your current pipeline at Grubhub? What are some references that you recommend for anyone who is designing a new data platform?

Contact Info

@sirchristian on Twitter Blog sirchristian on GitHub

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