Summary In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast Bartosz Mikulski talks about preparing data for AI applications. Bartosz shares his journey from data engineering to MLOps and emphasizes the importance of data testing over software development in AI contexts. He discusses the types of data assets required for AI applications, including extensive test datasets, especially in generative AI, and explains the differences in data requirements for various AI application styles. The conversation also explores the skills data engineers need to transition into AI, such as familiarity with vector databases and new data modeling strategies, and highlights the challenges of evolving AI applications, including frequent reprocessing of data when changing chunking strategies or embedding models.

Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData migrations are brutal. They drag on for months—sometimes years—burning through resources and crushing team morale. Datafold's AI-powered Migration Agent changes all that. Their unique combination of AI code translation and automated data validation has helped companies complete migrations up to 10 times faster than manual approaches. And they're so confident in their solution, they'll actually guarantee your timeline in writing. Ready to turn your year-long migration into weeks? Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today for the details. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Bartosz Mikulski about how to prepare data for use in AI applicationsInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Can you start by outlining some of the main categories of data assets that are needed for AI applications?How does the nature of the application change those requirements? (e.g. RAG app vs. agent, etc.)How do the different assets map to the stages of the application lifecycle?What are some of the common roles and divisions of responsibility that you see in the construction and operation of a "typical" AI application?For data engineers who are used to data warehousing/BI, what are the skills that map to AI apps?What are some of the data modeling patterns that are needed to support AI apps?chunking strategies metadata managementWhat are the new categories of data that data engineers need to manage in the context of AI applications?agent memory generation/evolution conversation history managementdata collection for fine tuningWhat are some of the notable evolutions in the space of AI applications and their patterns that have happened in the past ~1-2 years that relate to the responsibilities of data engineers?What are some of the skills gaps that teams should be aware of and identify training opportunities for?What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen data teams address the needs of AI applications?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on AI applications and their reliance on data?What are some of the emerging trends that you are paying particular attention to?Contact Info WebsiteLinkedInParting 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 SparkRayChunking StrategiesHypothetical document embeddingsModel Fine TuningPrompt CompressionThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Summary

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

Announcements

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

Interview

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

Followed on from hype about "data science"

Hadoop era Streaming Lambda and Kappa architectures

Not really referenced anymore

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

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

Data catalogs

Amundsen and Alation

Orchestration engine

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

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

Data catalog -> data discovery -> active metadata

Business intelligence

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

Rise of ELT

dbt Corresponding introduction of reverse ETL

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

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

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

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

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

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

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

Go to materialize.comSupport Data Engineering Podcast

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

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! This episode is brought to you by Acryl Data, the company behind DataHub, the leading developer-friendly data catalog for the modern data stack. Open Source DataHub is running in production at several companies like Peloton, Optum, Udemy, Zynga and others. Acryl Data provides DataHub as an easy to consume SaaS product which has been adopted by several companies. Signup for the SaaS product at dataengineeringpodcast.com/acryl RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Demetrios Brinkmann and David Aponte about what you need to know about MLOps as a data engineer

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

What are the areas that are currently underdeveloped/underserved?

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

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

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

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

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

Summary Gartner analysts are tasked with identifying promising companies each year that are making an impact in their respective categories. For businesses that are working in the data management and analytics space they recognized the efforts of Timbr.ai, Soda Data, Nexla, and Tada. In this episode the founders and leaders of each of these organizations share their perspective on the current state of the market, and the challenges facing businesses and data professionals today.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Have you ever had to develop ad-hoc solutions for security, privacy, and compliance requirements? Are you spending too much of your engineering resources on creating database views, configuring database permissions, and manually granting and revoking access to sensitive data? Satori has built the first DataSecOps Platform that streamlines data access and security. Satori’s DataSecOps automates data access controls, permissions, and masking for all major data platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift and SQL Server and even delegates data access management to business users, helping you move your organization from default data access to need-to-know access. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/satori today and get a $5K credit for your next Satori subscription. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Saket Saurabh, Maarten Masschelein, Akshay Deshpande, and Dan Weitzner about the challenges facing data practitioners today and the solutions that are being brought to market for addressing them, as well as the work they are doing that got them recognized as "cool vendors" by Gartner.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you each describe what you view as the biggest challenge facing data professionals? Who are you building your solutions for and what are the most common data management problems are you all solving? What are different components of Data Management and why is it so complex? What will simplify this process, if any? The report covers a lot of new data management terminology – data governance, data observability, data fabric, data mesh, DataOps, MLOps, AIOps – what does this all mean and why is it important for data engineers? How has the data management space changed in recent times? Describe the current data management landscape and any key developments. From your perspective, what are the biggest challenges in the data management space today? What modern data management features are lacking in existing databases? Gartner imagines a future where data and analytics leaders need to be prepared to rely on data manage

Summary When you build a machine learning model, the first step is always to load your data. Typically this means downloading files from object storage, or querying a database. To speed up the process, why not build the model inside the database so that you don’t have to move the information? In this episode Paige Roberts explains the benefits of pushing the machine learning processing into the database layer and the approach that Vertica has taken for their implementation. If you are looking for a way to speed up your experimentation, or an easy way to apply AutoML then this conversation is for you.

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! 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 Paige Roberts about machine learning workflows inside the database

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of the current state of the market for databases that support in-process machine learning?

What are the motivating factors for running a machine learning workflow inside the database?

What styles of ML are feasible to do inside the database? (e.g. bayesian inference, deep learning, etc.) What are the performance implications of running a model training pipeline within the database runtime? (both in terms of training performance boosts, and database performance impacts) Can you describe the architecture of how the machine learning process is managed by the database engine? How do you manage interacting with Python/R/Jupyter/etc. when working within the database? What is the impact on data pipeline and MLOps architectures when using the database to manage the machine learning workflow? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen in-database ML used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on machine learning inside the database? When is in-database ML the wrong choice? What are the recent trends/

Summary The process of building and deploying machine learning projects requires a staggering number of systems and stakeholders to work in concert. In this episode Yaron Haviv, co-founder of Iguazio, discusses the complexities inherent to the process, as well as how he has worked to democratize the technologies necessary to make machine learning operations maintainable.

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! Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Once you sign up and create an alert in Datafold for your company data, they will send you a cool water flask. 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. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Yaron Haviv about Iguazio, a platform for end to end automation of machine learning applications using MLOps principles.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data science & analytics? Can you start by giving an overview of what Iguazio is and the story of how it got started? How would you characterize your target or typical customer? What are the biggest challenges that you see around building production grade workflows for machine learning?

How does Iguazio help to address those complexities?

For customers who have already invested in the technical and organizational capacity for data science and data engineering, how does Iguazio integrate with their environments? What are the responsibilities of a data engineer throughout the different stages of the lifecycle for a machine learning application? Can you describe how the Iguazio platform is architected?

How has the design of the platform evolved since you first began working on it? How have the industry best practices around bringing machine learning to production changed?

How do you approach testing/validation of machine learning applications and releasing them to production environments? (e.g. CI/CD) Once a model is in

Summary As more organizations are gaining experience with data management and incorporating analytics into their decision making, their next move is to adopt machine learning. In order to make those efforts sustainable, the core capability they need is for data scientists and analysts to be able to build and deploy features in a self service manner. As a result the feature store is becoming a required piece of the data platform. To fill that need Kevin Stumpf and the team at Tecton are building an enterprise feature store as a service. In this episode he explains how his experience building the Michelanagelo platform at Uber has informed the design and architecture of Tecton, how it integrates with your existing data systems, and the elements that are required for well engineered feature store.

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 $60 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Do you want to get better at Python? Now is an excellent time to take an online course. Whether you’re just learning Python or you’re looking for deep dives on topics like APIs, memory mangement, async and await, and more, our friends at Talk Python Training have a top-notch course for you. If you’re just getting started, be sure to check out the Python for Absolute Beginners course. It’s like the first year of computer science that you never took compressed into 10 fun hours of Python coding and problem solving. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/talkpython today and get 10% off the course that will help you find your next level. That’s dataengineeringpodcast.com/talkpython, and don’t forget to thank them for supporting the show. You invest so much in your data infrastructure – you simply can’t afford to settle for unreliable data. Fortunately, there’s hope: in the same way that New Relic, DataDog, and other Application Performance Management solutions ensure reliable software and keep application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo’s end-to-end Data Observability Platform monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence. The platform uses machine learning to infer and learn your data, proactively identify data issues, assess its impact through lineage, and notify those who need to know before it impacts the business. By empowering data teams with end-to-end data reliability, Monte Carlo helps organizations save time, increase revenue, and restore trust in their data. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo today to request a demo and see how Monte Carlo delivers data observability across your data infrastructure. The first 25 will receive a free, limited edition Monte Carlo hat! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kevin Stumpf about Tecton and the role that the feature store plays in a modern MLOps platform

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what you are building at Tecton and your motivation for starting the business? For anyone who isn’t familiar with the concept, what is an example of a feature? How do you define what a feature store is? What role does a feature store play in the overall lifecycle of a machine learning p