Summary Data and analytics are permeating every system, including customer-facing applications. The introduction of embedded analytics to an end-user product creates a significant shift in requirements for your data layer. The Pinot OLAP datastore was created for this purpose, optimizing for low latency queries on rapidly updating datasets with highly concurrent queries. In this episode Kishore Gopalakrishna and Xiang Fu explain how it is able to achieve those characteristics, their work at StarTree to make it more easily available, and how you can start using it for your own high throughput data workloads 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! So now your modern data stack is set up. How is everyone going to find the data they need, and understand it? Select Star is a data discovery platform that automatically analyzes & documents your data. For every table in Select Star, you can find out where the data originated, which dashboards are built on top of it, who’s using it in the company, and how they’re using it, all the way down to the SQL queries. Best of all, it’s simple to set up, and easy for both engineering and operations teams to use. With Select Star’s data catalog, a single source of truth for your data is built in minutes, even across thousands of datasets. Try it out for free and double the length of your free trial today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/selectstar. You’ll also get a swag package when you continue on a paid plan. 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 today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/acryl Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kishore Gopalakrishna and Xiang Fu about Apache Pinot and its applications for powering user-facing analytics

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Pinot is and the story behind it? What are the primary use cases that Pinot is designed to support? There are numerous OLAP engines available with varying tradeoffs and optimal use cases. What are the cases where Pinot is the preferred choice?

How does it compare to systems such as Clickhouse (for OLAP) or CubeJS/GoodData (for embedded analytics)?

How do the operational needs of a database engine change as you move from serving internal stakeholders to external end-users? Can you describe how Pinot is architected?

What were the key design elements that were necessary to support low-latency queries with high concurrency?

Can you describe a typical end-to-end architecture where Pinot will be used for embedded analytics?

What are some of the tools/technologies/platforms/design patterns that Pinot might replace or obviate?

What are some of the useful lessons related to data modeling that users of Pinot should consider?

What are some edge cases that they might encounter due to details of how the storage layer is architected? (e.g. data

Welcome to the Qrvey Podcast. In today’s episode we’re talking to Nick Durkin, Field CTO and VP of Field Engineering at Harness. He has experience in all kinds of areas, from investing to understanding architecture, so he’s the perfect guest to kick off our podcast!   Nick shares some of his knowledge around how SaaS companies can grow and scale faster, the importance of time and speed in the SaaS niche, and the biggest challenges facing companies here.   We discuss the importance of SaaS companies understanding their core competencies and focusing on what they do best. We also dive into the pros and cons associated with using third-party tools instead of developing everything themselves. Nick talks about the trends of the cloud age, like serverless architecture, and how important they are. Is this the only way to go?   Finally, Nick explains the importance of people when building companies, and creating a positive environment and culture for collaboration between everyone involved.   This episode is brought to you by Qrvey The tools you need to take action with your data, on a platform built for maximum scalability, security, and cost efficiencies. If you’re ready to reduce complexity and dramatically lower costs, contact us today at qrvey.com. Qrvey, the modern no-code analytics solution for SaaS companies on AWS.

Welcome to the SaaS Scaled podcast, where we host regular conversations with people from every corner of the SaaS space. We’ll talk about growing, scaling, and developing SaaS companies, as well as all the challenges involved in this. We’ll be speaking to seasoned veterans of the SaaS space and getting valuable insights from them — insights gathered over years of experience in the trenches.   Join us as we dive deep into the world of building and scaling SaaS projects.

Building a SAAS business that focuses on building a research tool, more than building a data product, is how Jonathan Kay, CEO and Co-Founder of Apptopia frames his company’s work. Jonathan and I worked together when Apptopia pivoted from its prior business into a mobile intelligence platform for brands. Part of the reason I wanted to have Jonathan talk to you all is because I knew that he would strip away all the easy-to-see shine and varnish from their success and get really candid about what worked…and what hasn’t…during their journey to turn a data product into a successful SAAS business. So get ready: Jonathan is going to reveal the very curvy line that Apptopia has taken to get where they are today. 

In this episode, Jonathan also describes one of the core product design frameworks that Apptopia is currently using to help deliver actionable insights to their customers. For Jonathan, Apptopia’s research-centric approach changes the ways in which their customers can interact with data and is helping eliminate the lull between “the why” and “the actioning” with data.

Here are some of the key parts of  the interview:

An introduction to Apptopia and how they serve brands in the world of mobile app data (00:36) The current UX gaps that Apptopia is working to fill (03:32) How Apptopia balances flexibility with ease-of-use  (06:22) How Apptopia establishes the boundaries of its product when it’s just one part of a user’s overall workflow (10:06) The challenge of “low use, low trust” and getting “non-data” people to act (13:45) Developing strong conclusions and opinions and presenting them to customers (18:10) How Apptopia’s product design process has evolved when working with data, particularly at the UI level (21:30) The relationship between Apptopia’s buyer, versus the users of the product and how they balance the two (24:45) Jonathan’s advice for hiring good data product design and management staff (29:45) How data fits into Jonathan’s own decision making as CEO of Apptopia (33:21) Jonathan’s advice for emerging data product leaders (36:30)

Quotes from Today’s Episode  

“I want to just give you some props on the work that you guys have done and seeing where it's gone from when we worked together. The word grit, I think, is the word that I most associate with you and Eli [former CEO, co-founder] from those times. It felt very genuine that you believed in your mission and you had a long-term vision for it.” - Brian T. O’Neill (@rhythmspice) (02:08)

“A research tool gives you the ability to create an input, which might be, ‘I want to see how Netflix is performing.’ And then it gives you a bunch of data. And it gives you good user experience that allows you to look for the answer to the question that’s in your head, but you need to start with a question. You need to know how to manipulate the tool. It requires a huge amount of experience and understanding of the data consumer in order to actually get the answer to the question. For me, that feels like a miss because I think the amount of people who need and can benefit from data, and the amount of people who know how to instrument the tools to get the answers from the data—well, I think there’s a huge disconnect in those numbers. And just like when I take my car to get service, I expected the car mechanic knows exactly what the hell is going on in there, right? Like, our obligation as a data provider should be to help people get closer to the answer. And I think we still have some room to go in order to get there.” - Jonathan Kay (@JonathanCKay) (04:54)

“You need to present someone the what, the why, etc.—then the research component [of your data product] is valuable. And so it’s not that having a research tool isn’t valuable. It’s just, you can’t have the whole thing be that. You need to give them the what and the why first.” - Jonathan Kay (@JonathanCKay) (08:45) “You can't put equal resources into everything. Knowing the boundaries of your data product is important, but it's a hard thing to know sometimes where to draw those. A leader has to ask, ‘am I getting outside of my sweet spot? Is this outside of the mission?’ Figuring the right boundaries goes back to customer research.” - Brian T. O’Neill (@rhythmspice) (12:54)

“What would I have done differently if I was starting Apptopia today? I would have invested into the quality of the data earlier. I let the product design move me into the clouds a little bit, because sometimes you're designing a product and you're designing visuals, but we were doing it without real data. One of the biggest things that I've learned over a lot of mistakes over a long period of time, is that we've got to incorporate real data in the design process.” - Jonathan Kay (@JonathanCKay) (20:09)

“We work with one of the biggest food manufacturer distributors in the world, and they were choosing between us and our biggest competitor, and what they essentially did was [say] “I need to put this report together every two weeks. I used your competitor’s platform during a trial and your platform during the trial, and I was able to do it two hours faster in your platform, so I chose you—because all the other checkboxes were equal. However, at the end of the day, if we could get two hours a week back by using your tool, saving time and saving money and making better decisions, they’re all equal ROI contributors.” - Jonathan Kay on UX (@JonathanCKay) (27:23)

“In terms of our product design and management hires, we're typically looking for people who have not worked at one company for 10 years. We've actually found a couple phenomenal designers that went from running their own consulting company to wanting to join full time. That was kind of a big win because one of them had a huge breadth of experience working with a bunch of different products in a bunch of different spaces.”- Jonathan Kay (@JonathanCKay) (30:34)

“In terms of how I use data when making decisions for Apptopia, here’s an example. If you break our business down into different personas, my understanding one time was that one of our personas was more stagnant. The data however, did not support that. And so we're having a resource planning meeting, and I'm saying, ‘let's pull back resources a little bit,’ but [my team is] showing me data that says my assumption on that customer segment is actually incorrect. I think entrepreneurs and passionate people need data more because we have so much conviction in our decisions—and because of that,I'm more likely to make bad decisions. Theoretically good entrepreneurs should have good instincts, and you need to trust those, but what I’m saying is, you also need to check those. It's okay to make sure that your instinct is correct, right? And one of the ways that I’ve gotten more mature is by forcing people to show me data to either back up my decision in either direction and being comfortable being wrong. And I am wrong at least half of the time with those things!” - Jonathan Kay (@JonathanCKay) (34:09)

Summary Data observability is a set of technical and organizational capabilities related to understanding how your data is being processed and used so that you can proactively identify and fix errors in your workflows. In this episode Metaplane founder Kevin Hu shares his working definition of the term and explains the work that he and his team are doing to cut down on the time to adoption for this new set of practices. He discusses the factors that influenced his decision to start with the data warehouse, the potential shortcomings of that approach, and where he plans to go from there. This is a great exploration of what it means to treat your data platform as a living system and apply state of the art engineering to it.

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! Today’s episode is Sponsored by Prophecy.io – the low-code data engineering platform for the cloud. Prophecy provides an easy-to-use visual interface to design & deploy data pipelines on Apache Spark & Apache Airflow. Now all the data users can use software engineering best practices – git, tests and continuous deployment with a simple to use visual designer. How does it work? – You visually design the pipelines, and Prophecy generates clean Spark code with tests on git; then you visually schedule these pipelines on Airflow. You can observe your pipelines with built in metadata search and column level lineage. Finally, if you have existing workflows in AbInitio, Informatica or other ETL formats that you want to move to the cloud, you can import them automatically into Prophecy making them run productively on Spark. Create your free account today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prophecy. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kevin Hu about Metaplane, a platform aiming to provide observability for modern data stacks, from warehouses to BI dashboards and everything in between.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Metaplane is and the story behind it? Data observability is an area that has seen a huge amount of activity over the past couple of years. What is your working definition of that term?

What are the areas of differentiation that you see across vendors in the space?

Can you describe how the Metaplane platform is architected?

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

establishing seasonality in data metrics blind spots from operating at the level of the data warehouse What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Metaplane used? What are the most interesti

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

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Maura Church, David Wallace, Benn Stancil, and Gleb Mezhanskiy about the key themes of 2021 in the data ecosystem and what to expect for next year

Interview

Introduction

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

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

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

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

To what extent does speed matter? Over the past

Summary Data Engineering is still a relatively new field that is going through a continued evolution as new technologies are introduced and new requirements are understood. In this episode Maxime Beauchemin returns to revisit what it means to be a data engineer and how the role has changed over the past 5 years.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Maxime Beauchemin about the impacts that the evolution of the modern data stack has had on the role and responsibilities of data engineers

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is your current working definition of a data engineer?

How has that definition changed since your article on the "rise of the data engineer" and episode 3 of this show about "defining data engineering"?

How has the growing availability of data infrastructure services shifted foundational skills and knowledge that are necessary to be effective?

How should a new/aspiring data engineer focus their time and energy to become effective?

One of the core themes in this current spate of technologies is "democratization of data". In your post on the downfall of the data engineer you called out the pressure on data engineers to maintain control with so many contributors with varying levels of skill and understanding. How well is the "modern data stack" balancing these concerns? An interesting impact of the growing usage of data is the constrained availability of data engineers. How do you see the effects of the job market on driving evolution of tooling and services? With the explosion of tools and services for working with data, a new problem has evolved of which ones to use for a given organization. What do you see as

Send us a text Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [[email protected]] and tell us why you should be next.

Abstract Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, VP, IBM Expert Services Delivery, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun. This week on Making Data Simple, we have Benn Stancil, Chief Analytics Officer + Founder @ Mode. Benn is an accomplished data analyst with deep expertise in collaborative Business Intelligence and Interactive Data Science. Benn is Co-founder, President, and Chief  Analytics Officer of Mode, an award-winning SaaS company that combines the best elements of Business Intelligence (ABI), Data Science (DS) and Machine Learning (ML) to empower data teams to answer impactful questions and collaborate on analysis across a range of business functions. Under Benn’s leadership, the Mode platform has evolved to enable data teams to explore, visualize, analyze and share data in a powerful end-to-end workflow. Prior to founding Mode, Benn served in senior Analytics positions at Microsoft and Yammer, and worked as a  researcher for the International Economics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Benn also served as an Undergraduate Research Fellow at Wake Forest University,  where he received his B.S. in Mathematics and Economics. Benn believes in fostering a shared sense of humility and gratitude.

Show Notes 1:22 – Benn’s history 7:09 – Tell us how you got to where you are today 9:14 – Tell us about Mode 12:08 – What is your definition of the Chief Analytics Officer? 21:53 – Why do we need another BI tool? 24:09 – What’s your secret sauce? 27:48 – Where did the name Mode come from? 28:41 – How do we use Mode? 31:08 – What is you goto market strategy?  32:38 – Any client references? 34:58 – “The missing piece in the modern data stack” tell us about this Mode  Email: [email protected] [email protected] Twitter: benn stancil Connect with the Team Producer Kate Brown - LinkedIn. Producer Steve Templeton - LinkedIn. Host Al Martin - LinkedIn and Twitter.  Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.

Summary Building a well managed data ecosystem for your organization requires a holistic view of all of the producers, consumers, and processors of information. The team at Metaphor are building a fully connected metadata layer to provide both technical and social intelligence about your data. In this episode Pardhu Gunnam and Mars Lan explain how they have designed the architecture and user experience to allow everyone to collaborate on the data lifecycle and provide opportunities for automation and extensible workflows.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Pardhu Gunnam and Mars Lan about Metaphor Data, a platform aiming to be the system of record for your data ecosystem

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Metaphor is and the story behind it? On your site it states that you are aiming to be the "system of record" for your data platform. Can you unpack that statement and its implications?

What are the shortcomings in the "data catalog" approach to metadata collection and presentation?

Who are the target end users of Metaphor and what are the pain points for each persona that you are prioritizing?

How has that focus informed your priorities for user experience design and feature development?

Can you describe how the Metaphor platform is architected?

What are the lessons that you learned from your work at DataHub that have informed your work on Metaphor?

There has been a huge amount of focus on the "modern data stack" with an assumption that there is a cloud data warehouse as the central component that all data flows through. How does Metaphor’s design allow for usage in platforms that aren’t dominated

Summary The core to providing your users with excellent service is to understand them and provide a personalized experience. Unfortunately many sites and applications take that to the extreme and collect too much information. In order to make it easier for developers to build customer profiles in a way that respects their privacy Serge Huber helped to create the Apache Unomi framework as an open source customer data platform. In this episode he explains how it can be used to build rich and useful profiles of your users, the system architecture that powers it, and some of the ways that it is being integrated into an organization’s broader data ecosystem.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Serge Huber about Apache Unomi, an open source customer data platform designed to manage customers, leads and visitors data and help personalize customers experiences

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Unomi is and the story behind it? What are the goals and target use cases of Unomi? What are the aspects of collecting and aggregating profile information that present challenges to developers?

How does the design of Unomi reduce that burden?

How does the focus of Unomi compare to systems such as Segment/Rudderstack or Optimizely for collecting user interactions and applying personalization? How does Unomi fit in the architecture of an application or data infrastructure? Can you describe how Unomi itself is architected?

How have the goals and design of the project changed or evolved since it started? What are some of the most complex or challenging engineering projects that you have worked through?

Can you describe the wo

Summary Hiring data professionals is challenging for a multitude of reasons, and as with every interview process there is a potential for bias to creep in. Tim Freestone founded Alooba to provide a more stable reference point for evaluating candidates to ensure that you can make more informed comparisons based on their actual knowledge. In this episode he explains how Alooba got started, how it is being used in the interview process for data oriented roles, and how it can also provide visibility into your organizations overall data literacy. The whole process of hiring is an important organizational skill to cultivate and this is an interesting exploration of the specific challenges involved in finding data professionals.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tim Freestone about Alooba, an assessment platform for evaluating data and analytics candidates to improve hiring outcomes for data roles.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Alooba is and the story behind it? What are the main goals that you are trying to achieve with Alooba? What are the main challenges that employers and candidates face when navigating their respective roles in the hiring process?

What are some of the difficulties that are specific to data oriented roles?

What are some of the complexities involved in designing a user experience that is positive and productive for both candidates and companies? What are some strategies that you have developed for establishing a fair and consistent baseline of skills to ensure consistent comparison across candidates? One of the problems that comes from test-based skills assessment is the implicit bias towa

Summary The data that you have access to affects the questions that you can answer. By using external data sources you can drastically increase the range of analysis that is available to your organization. The challenge comes in all of the operational aspects of finding, accessing, organizing, and serving that data. In this episode Mark Hookey discusses how he and his team at Demyst do all of the DataOps for external data sources so that you don’t have to, including the systems necessary to organize and catalog the various collections that they host, the various serving layers to provide query interfaces that match your platform, and the utility of having a single place to access a multitude of information. If you are having trouble answering questions for your business with the data that you generate and collect internally, then it is definitely worthwhile to explore the information available from external sources.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Mark Hookey about Demyst Data, a platform for operationalizing external data

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Demyst is and the story behind it?

What are the services and systems that you provide for organizations to incorporate external sources in their data workflows? Who are your target customers?

What are some examples of data sets that an organization might want to use in their analytics?

How are these different from SaaS data that an organization might integrate with tools such as Stitcher and Fivetran?

What are some of the challenges that are introduced by working with these external data sets?

If an organization isn’t using Demyst what are some

Summary The technology for scaling storage and processing of data has gone through massive evolution over the past decade, leaving us with the ability to work with massive datasets at the cost of massive complexity. Nick Schrock created the Dagster framework to help tame that complexity and scale the organizational capacity for working with data. In this episode he shares the journey that he and his team at Elementl have taken to understand the state of the ecosystem and how they can provide a foundational layer for a holistic data platform.

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 and blazing fast NVMe storage there’s nothing slowing you down. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo to learn more. The first 10 people to request a personalized product tour will receive an exclusive Monte Carlo Swag box. Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Nick Schrock about the evolution of Dagster and its path forward

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Dagster is and the story behind it? How has the project and community changed/evolved since we last spoke 2 years ago?

How has the experience of the past 2 years clarified the challenges and opportunities that exist in the data ecosystem?

What do you see as the foundational vs transient complexities that are germane to the industry?

One of the emerging ideas in Dagster is the "software defined data asset" as the central entity in the framework. How has that shifted the way that engineers approach pipeline design and composition?

How did that conceptual shift inform the accompanying refactor of the core principles in the framework? (jobs, ops, graphs)

One of the powerful elements of the Dagster framework is the investment in rich metadata as a foundational principle. What are the opportunities for integrating and extending that context throughout the rest of an organizations data platform?

What do you see as the potential for efforts such as OpenLineage and OpenMetadata to allow for other compone

Summary A significant source of friction and wasted effort in building and integrating data management systems is the fragmentation of metadata across various tools. After experiencing the impacts of fragmented metadata and previous attempts at building a solution Suresh Srinivas and Sriharsha Chintalapani created the OpenMetadata project. In this episode they share the lessons that they have learned through their previous attempts and the positive impact that a unified metadata layer had during their time at Uber. They also explain how the OpenMetadat project is aiming to be a common standard for defining and storing metadata for every use case in data platforms and the ways that they are architecting the reference implementation to simplify its adoption. This is an ambitious and exciting project, so listen and try it out 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! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sriharsha Chintalapani and Suresh Srinivas about OpenMetadata, an open standard for metadata and a reference implementation for a central metadata store

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what the OpenMetadata project is and the story behind it?

What are the goals of the project?

What are the common challenges faced by engineers and data practitioners in organizing the metadata for their systems? What are the capabilities that a centralized and holis

Summary The precursor to widespread adoption of cloud data warehouses was the creation of customer data platforms. Acting as a centralized repository of information about how your customers interact with your organization they drove a wave of analytics about how to improve products based on actual usage data. A natural outgrowth of that capability is the more recent growth of reverse ETL systems that use those analytics to feed back into the operational systems used to engage with the customer. In this episode Tejas Manohar and Rachel Bradley-Haas share the story of their own careers and experiences coinciding with these trends. They also discuss the current state of the market for these technological patterns and how to take advantage of them in your own work.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo and start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Rachel Bradley-Haas and Tejas Manohar about the combination of operational analytics and the customer data platform

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can we start by discussing what it means to have a "customer data platform"? What are the challenges that organizations face in establishing a unified view of their customer interactions?

How do the presence of multiple product lines impact the ability to understand the relationship with the customer?

We have been building data warehouses and business intelligence systems for decades. How does the idea of a CDP differ from the approaches of those previous generations? A recent outgrowth of the focus on creating a CDP is the introduction of "operational analytics", which was initially termed "reverse ETL". What are your opinions on the semantics and importance of these names?

What is the relationship between a CDP and operational analytics? (can you have one without the other?)

How have the capabilities

Summary Streaming data systems have been growing more capable and flexible over the past few years. Despite this, it is still challenging to build reliable pipelines for stream processing. In this episode Eric Sammer discusses the shortcomings of the current set of streaming engines and how they force engineers to work at an extremely low level of abstraction. He also explains why he started Decodable to address that limitation and the work that he and his team have done to let data engineers build streaming pipelines entirely in SQL.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Eric Sammer about Decodable, a platform for simplifying the work of building real-time data pipelines

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Decodable is and the story behind it? Who are the target users, and how has that focus informed your prioritization of features at launch? What are the complexities that data engineers encounter when building pipelines on streaming systems? What are the distributed systems concepts and design optimizations that are often skipped over or misunderstood by engineers who are using them? (e.g. backpressure, exactly once semantics, isolation levels, etc.)

How do those mismatches in understanding and expectation impact the correctness and reliability of the workflows that they are building?

Can you describe how y

Summary The market for business intelligence has been going through an evolutionary shift in recent years. One of the driving forces for that change has been the rise of analytics engineering powered by dbt. Lightdash has fully embraced that shift by building an entire open source business intelligence framework that is powered by dbt models. In this episode Oliver Laslett describes why dashboards aren’t sufficient for business analytics, how Lightdash promotes the work that you are already doing in your data warehouse modeling with dbt, and how they are focusing on bridging the divide between data teams and business teams and the requirements that they have for data workflows.

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. 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. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Oliver Laslett about Lightdash, an open source business intelligence system powered by your dbt models

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Lightdash is and the story behind it?

What are the main goals of the project? Who are the target users, and how has that profile informed your feature priorities?

Business intelligence is a market that has gone through several generational shifts, with products targeting numerous personas and purposes. What are the capabilities that make Lightdash stand out from the other options? Can you describe how Lightdash is architected?

How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved since you first began working on it? What have been the most challenging engineering problems that you have dealt with?

How does the approach that you are taking with Lightdash compare to systems such as Transform and Metriql that aim to provide a dedicated metrics layer? Can you describe the workflow for som

Summary The binding element of all data work is the metadata graph that is generated by all of the workflows that produce the assets used by teams across the organization. The DataHub project was created as a way to bring order to the scale of LinkedIn’s data needs. It was also designed to be able to work for small scale systems that are just starting to develop in complexity. In order to support the project and make it even easier to use for organizations of every size Shirshanka Das and Swaroop Jagadish founded Acryl Data. In this episode they discuss the recent work that has been done by the community, how their work is building on top of that foundation, and how you can get started with DataHub for your own work to manage data discovery today. They also share their ambitions for the near future of adding data observability and data quality management features.

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. 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. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Shirshanka Das and Swaroop Jagadish about Acryl Data, the company driving the open source metadata project DataHub for powering data discovery, data observability and federated data governance.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Acryl Data is and the story behind it? How has your experience of building and running DataHub at LinkedIn informed your product direction for Acryl?

What are some lessons that your co-founder Swaroop has contributed from his experience at AirBnB?

The data catalog/discovery/quality market has become very active over the past year. What is your perspective on the market, and what are the gaps that are not yet bei

Summary The term "data platform" gets thrown around a lot, but have you stopped to think about what it actually means for you and your organization? In this episode Lior Gavish, Lior Solomon, and Atul Gupte share their view of what it means to have a data platform, discuss their experiences building them at various companies, and provide advice on how to treat them like a software product. This is a valuable conversation about how to approach the work of selecting the tools that you use to power your data systems and considerations for how they can be woven together for a unified experience across your various stakeholders.

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. 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 Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Lior Gavish, Lior Solomon, and Atul Gupte about the technical, social, and architectural aspects of building your data platform as a product for your internal customers

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? – all Can we start by establishing a definition of "data platform" for the purpose of this conversation? Who are the stakeholders in a data platform?

Where does the responsibility lie for creating and maintaining ("owning") the platform?

What are some of the technical and organizational constraints that are likely to factor into the design and execution of the platform? What are the minimum set of requirements necessary to qualify as a platform? (as opposed to a collection of discrete components)

What are the additional capabilities that should be in place to simplify the use and maintenance of the platform?

How are data platforms managed? Are they managed by technical teams, product managers, etc.? What is the profile for a data product manager? – Atul G. How do you set SLIs / SLOs with your data platform team when you don’t have clear metrics you’re tracking? – Lior S. There has been a lot of conversation recently about different interpretations of the "modern data stack". For a team who is just starting to build out their platform, h

Summary The Presto project has become the de facto option for building scalable open source analytics in SQL for the data lake. In recent months the community has focused their efforts on making it the fastest possible option for running your analytics in the cloud. In this episode Dipti Borkar discusses the work that she and her team are doing at Ahana to simplify the work of running your own PrestoDB environment in the cloud. She explains how they are optimizin the runtime to reduce latency and increase query throughput, the ways that they are contributing back to the open source community, and the exciting improvements that are in the works to make Presto an even more powerful option for all of your analytics.

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! Schema changes, missing data, and volume anomalies caused by your data sources can happen without any advanced notice if you lack visibility into your data-in-motion. That leaves DataOps reactive to data quality issues and can make your consumers lose confidence in your data. By connecting to your pipeline orchestrator like Apache Airflow and centralizing your end-to-end metadata, Databand.ai lets you identify data quality issues and their root causes from a single dashboard. With Databand.ai, you’ll know whether the data moving from your sources to your warehouse will be available, accurate, and usable when it arrives. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/databand to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Databand.ai and take control of your data quality today. 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 Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Dipti Borkar, cofounder Ahana about Presto and Ahana, SaaS managed service for Presto

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Ahana is and the story behind it? There has been a lot of recent activity in the Presto community. Can you give an overview of the options that are available for someone wanting to use its SQL engine for querying their data?

What is Ahana’s role in the community/ecosystem? (happy to skip this question if it’s too contentious) What are some of the notable differences that have emerged over the past couple of years between the Trino (formerly PrestoSQL) and PrestoDB projects?

Another area that has been seeing a lot of activity is data lakes and projects to make them more manageable and feature complete (e.g. Hudi, Delta Lake, Iceberg, Nessie, LakeFS, etc.). How has that influenced your product focus and capabilities?

How does this activity change the calculus for organizations who are deciding on a lake or warehouse for their data architecture?

Can y