Summary

Data has been one of the most substantial drivers of business and economic value for the past few decades. Bob Muglia has had a front-row seat to many of the major shifts driven by technology over his career. In his recent book "Datapreneurs" he reflects on the people and businesses that he has known and worked with and how they relied on data to deliver valuable services and drive meaningful change.

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 Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Bob Muglia about his recent book about the idea of "Datapreneurs" and the role of data in the modern economy

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what your concept of a "Datapreneur" is?

How is this distinct from the common idea of an entreprenur?

What do you see as the key inflection points in data technologies and their impacts on business capabilities over the past ~30 years? In your role as the CEO of Snowflake you had a first-row seat for the rise of the "modern data stack". What do you see as the main positive and negative impacts of that paradigm?

What are the key issues that are yet to be solved in that ecosmnjjystem?

For technologists who are thinking about launching new ventures, what are the key pieces of advice that you would like to share? What do you see as the short/medium/long-term impact of AI on the technical, business, and societal arenas? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen business leaders use data to drive their vision? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on the Datapreneurs book? What are your key predictions for the future impact of data on the technical/economic/business landscapes?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

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

Datapreneurs Book SQL Server Snowflake Z80 Processor Navigational Database System R Redshift Microsoft Fabric Databricks Looker Fivetran

Podcast Episode

Databricks Unity Catalog RelationalAI 6th Normal Form Pinecone Vector DB

Podcast Episode

Perplexity AI

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Sponsored By: 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 The vast majority of data tools and platforms that you hear about are designed for working with structured, text-based data. What do you do when you need to manage unstructured information, or build a computer vision model? Activeloop was created for exactly that purpose. In this episode Davit Buniatyan, founder and CEO of Activeloop, explains why he is spending his time and energy on building a platform to simplify the work of getting your unstructured data ready for machine learning. He discusses the inefficiencies that teams run into from having to reprocess data multiple times, his work on the open source Hub library to solve this problem for everyone, and his thoughts on the vast potential that exists for using computer vision to solve hard and meaningful problems.

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! 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. 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 Davit Buniatyan about Activeloop, a platform for hosting and delivering datasets optimized for machine learning

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Activeloop is and the story behind it? How does the form and function of data storage introduce friction in the development and deployment of machine learning projects? How does the work that you are doing at Activeloop compare to vector databases such as Pinecone? You have a focus on image oriented data and computer vision projects. How does the specific applications of ML/DL influence the format and interactions with the data? Can you describe how the Activeloop platform is architected?

How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved since you began working on it?

What are the feature and performance tradeoffs between self-managed storage locations (e.g. S3, GCS) and the Activeloop platform? What is the process for sourcing, processing, and storing

Summary Machine learning models use vectors as the natural mechanism for representing their internal state. The problem is that in order for the models to integrate with external systems their internal state has to be translated into a lower dimension. To eliminate this impedance mismatch Edo Liberty founded Pinecone to build database that works natively with vectors. In this episode he explains how this technology will allow teams to accelerate the speed of innovation, how vectors make it possible to build more advanced search functionality, and how Pinecone is architected. This is an interesting conversation about how reconsidering the architecture of your systems can unlock impressive new capabilities.

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. When it comes to serving data for AI and ML projects, do you feel like you have to rebuild the plane while you’re flying it across the ocean? Molecula is an enterprise feature store that operationalizes advanced analytics and AI in a format designed for massive machine-scale projects without having to manage endless one-off information requests. With Molecula, data engineers manage one single feature store that serves the entire organization with millisecond query performance whether in the cloud or at your data center. And since it is implemented as an overlay, Molecula doesn’t disrupt legacy systems. High-growth startups use Molecula’s feature store because of its unprecedented speed, cost savings, and simplified access to all enterprise data. From feature extraction to model training to production, the Molecula feature store provides continuously updated feature access, reuse, and sharing without the need to pre-process data. If you need to deliver unprecedented speed, cost savings, and simplified access to large scale, real-time data, visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/molecula and request a demo. Mention that you’re a Data Engineering Podcast listener, and they’ll send you a free t-shirt. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Edo Liberty about Pinecone, a vector database for powering machine learning and similarity search

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what Pinecone is and the story behind it? What are some of the contexts where someone would want to perform a similarity search?

What are the considerations that someone should be aware of when deciding between Pinecone and Solr/Lucene for a search oriented use case?

What are some of the other use cases that Pinecone enables? In the absence of Pinecone, what kinds of systems and solutions are people b