Summary While the overall concept of timeseries data is uniform, its usage and applications are far from it. One of the most demanding applications of timeseries data is for application and server monitoring due to the problem of high cardinality. In his quest to build a generalized platform for managing timeseries Paul Dix keeps getting pulled back into the monitoring arena. In this episode he shares the history of the InfluxDB project, the business that he has helped to build around it, and the architectural aspects of the engine that allow for its flexibility in managing various forms of timeseries data. This is a fascinating exploration of the technical and organizational evolution of the Influx Data platform, with some promising glimpses of where they are headed in the near future.

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 Paul Dix about Influx Data and the different facets of the market for timeseries databases

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what you are building at Influx Data and the story behind it? Timeseries data is a fairly broad category with many variations in terms of storage volume, frequency, processing requirements, etc. This has led to an explosion of database engines and related tools to address these different needs. How do you think about your position and role in the ecosystem?

Who are your target customers and how does that focus inform your product and feature priorities? What are the use cases that Influx is best suited for?

Can you give an overview of the different projects, tools, and services that comprise your platform? How is InfluxDB architected?

How have the design and implementation of the DB engine changed or evolved since you first began working on it? What are you optimizing for on the consistency vs. availability spectrum of CAP? What is your approach to clustering/data distribution beyond a single node?

Summary Data Engineering is a broad and constantly evolving topic, which makes it difficult to teach in a concise and effective manner. Despite that, Daniel Molnar and Peter Fabian started the Pipeline Academy to do exactly that. In this episode they reflect on the lessons that they learned while teaching the first cohort of their bootcamp how to be effective data engineers. By focusing on the fundamentals, and making everyone write code, they were able to build confidence and impart the importance of context for their students.

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 Daniel Molnar and Peter Fabian about the lessons that they learned from their first cohort at the Pipeline data engineering academy

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by sharing the curriculum and learning goals for the students? How did you set a common baseline for all of the students to build from throughout the program?

What was your process for determining the structure of the tasks and the tooling used?

What were some of the topics/tools that the students had the most difficulty with?

What topics/tools were the easiest to grasp?

What are some difficulties that you encountered while trying to teach different concepts? How did you deal with the tension of teaching the fundamentals while tying them to toolchains that hiring managers are looking for? What are the successes that you had with this cohort and what changes are you making to your approach/curriculum to build on them? What are some of the failures that you encountered and what lessons have you taken from them? How did the pandemic impact your overall plan and execution of the initial cohort? What were the skills that you focused on for interview preparation? What level of ongoing support/engagement do you have with students once they complete the curriculum? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected solutions that you saw from your students? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working with your first cohort? When is a bootcamp the wrong approach for skill development? What do you have planned for the future of the Pipeline Academy?

Contact Info

Daniel

LinkedIn Website @soobrosa on Twitter

Peter

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Pipeline Academy

Blog

Scikit Pandas Urchin Kafka Three "C"s – Context, Confidence, and Code Prefect

Podcast Episode

Great Expectations

Podcast Episode Podcast.init Episode

Docker Kubernetes Become a Data Engineer On A Shoestring James Mickens

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary The database is the core of any system because it holds the data that drives your entire experience. We spend countless hours designing the data model, updating engine versions, and tuning performance. But how confident are you that you have configured it to be as performant as possible, given the dozens of parameters and how they interact with each other? Andy Pavlo researches autonomous database systems, and out of that research he created OtterTune to find the optimal set of parameters to use for your specific workload. In this episode he explains how the system works, the challenge of scaling it to work across different database engines, and his hopes for the future of database systems.

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 Andy Pavlo about OtterTune, a system to continuously monitor and improve database performance via machine learning

Interview

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

How does it relate to your work with NoisePage?

What are the challenges that database administrators, operators, and users run into when working with, configuring, and tuning transactional systems?

What are some of the contributing factors to the sprawling complexity of the configurable parameters for these databases?

Can you describe how OtterTune is implemented?

What are some of the aggregate benefits that OtterTune can gain by running as a centralized service and learning from all of the systems that it connects to? What are some of the assumptions that you made when starting the commercialization of this technology that have been challenged or invalidated as you began working with initial customers? How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved since you first began working on it?

What is involved in adding support for a new database engine?

How applicable are the OtterTune capabilities to analyti

Summary Working with unstructured data has typically been a motivation for a data lake. The challenge is imposing enough order on the platform to make it useful. Kirk Marple has spent years working with data systems and the media industry, which inspired him to build a platform for automatically organizing your unstructured assets to make them more valuable. In this episode he shares the goals of the Unstruk Data Warehouse, how it is architected to extract asset metadata and build a searchable knowledge graph from the information, and the myriad ways that the system can be used. If you are wondering how to deal with all of the information that doesn’t fit in your databases or data warehouses, then this episode 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! 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 Kirk Marple about Unstruk Data, a company that is building a data warehouse for unstructured data that ofers automated data preparation via metadata enrichment, integrated compute, and graph-based search

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Unstruk Data is and the story behind it? What would you classify as "unstructured data"?

What are some examples of industries that rely on large or varied sets of unstructured data? What are the challenges for analytics that are posed by the different categories of unstructured data?

What is the current state of the industry for working with unstructured data?

What are the unique capabilities that Unstruk provides and how does it integrate with the rest of the ecosystem? Where does it sit in the overall landscape of data tools?

Can you describe how the Unstruk data warehouse is implemented?

What are the assumptions that you had at the start of this project that have been challenged as you started working through the technical implementation and customer trials? How has the design and architecture evolved or changed since you began working on it?

How do you handle versioning of data, give

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 Google pioneered an impressive number of the architectural underpinnings of the broader big data ecosystem. Now they offer the technologies that they run internally to external users of their cloud platform. In this episode Lak Lakshmanan enumerates the variety of services that are available for building your various data processing and analytical systems. He shares some of the common patterns for building pipelines to power business intelligence dashboards, machine learning applications, and data warehouses. If you’ve ever been overwhelmed or confused by the array of services available in the Google Cloud Platform then this episode 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! 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 Lak Lakshmanan about the suite of services for data and analytics in Google Cloud Platform.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of the tools and products that are offered as part of Google Cloud for data and analytics?

How do the various systems relate to each other for building a full workflow? How do you balance the need for clean integration between services with the need to make them useful in isolation when used as a single component of a data platform?

What have you found to be the primary motivators for customers who are adopting GCP for some or all of their data workloads? What are some of the challenges that new users of GCP encounter when working with the data and analytics products that it offers? What are the systems that you have found to be easiest to work with?

Which are the most challenging to work with, whether due to the kinds of problems that they are solving for, or due to their user experience design?

How has your work with customers fed back into the products that you are building on top of? What are some examples of architectural or software patterns that are unique to the GCP product suite? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that y

Summary The way to build maintainable software and systems is through composition of individual pieces. By making those pieces high quality and flexible they can be used in surprising ways that the original creators couldn’t have imagined. One such component that has gone above and beyond its originally envisioned use case is BookKeeper, a distributed storage system that is optimized for durability and speed. In this episode Matteo Merli shares the story behind the creation of BookKeeper, the various ways that it is being used today, and the architectural aspects that make it such a strong building block for projects such as Pulsar. He also shares some of the other interesting systems that have been built on top of it and an amusing war story of running it at scale in its early 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! 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 Matteo Merli about Apache BookKeeper, a scalable, fault-tolerant, and low-latency storage service optimized for real-time workloads

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what BookKeeper is and the story behind it? What are the most notable features/capabilities of BookKeeper? What are some of the ways that BookKeeper is being used? How has your work on Pulsar influenced the features and product direction of BookKeeper? Can you describe the architecture of a BookKeeper cluster?

How have the design and goals of BookKeeper changed or evolved over time?

What is the impact of record-oriented storage on data distribution/allocation within the cluster when working with variable record sizes? What are some of the operational considerations that users should be aware of? What are some of the most interesting/compelling features from your perspective? What are some of the most often overlooked or misunderstood capabilities of BookKeeper? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen BookKeeper used? What

Data engineers who need to hit the ground running will use this book to build skills in Azure Data Factory v2 (ADF). The tutorial-first approach to ADF taken in this book gets you working from the first chapter, explaining key ideas naturally as you encounter them. From creating your first data factory to building complex, metadata-driven nested pipelines, the book guides you through essential concepts in Microsoft’s cloud-based ETL/ELT platform. It introduces components indispensable for the movement and transformation of data in the cloud. Then it demonstrates the tools necessary to orchestrate, monitor, and manage those components. The hands-on introduction to ADF found in this book is equally well-suited to data engineers embracing their first ETL/ELT toolset as it is to seasoned veterans of Microsoft’s SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). The example-driven approach leads you through ADF pipeline construction from the ground up, introducing important ideas and making learning natural and engaging. SSIS users will find concepts with familiar parallels, while ADF-first readers will quickly master those concepts through the book’s steady building up of knowledge in successive chapters. Summaries of key concepts at the end of each chapter provide a ready reference that you can return to again and again. What You Will Learn Create pipelines, activities, datasets, and linked services Build reusable components using variables, parameters, and expressions Move data into and around Azure services automatically Transform data natively using ADF data flows and Power Query data wrangling Master flow-of-control and triggers for tightly orchestrated pipeline execution Publish and monitor pipelines easily and with confidence Who This Book Is For Data engineers and ETL developers taking their first steps in Azure Data Factory, SQL Server Integration Services users making the transition toward doing ETL in Microsoft’s Azure cloud, and SQL Server database administrators involved in data warehousing and ETL operations

Summary SQL is the most widely used language for working with data, and yet the tools available for writing and collaborating on it are still clunky and inefficient. Frustrated with the lack of a modern IDE and collaborative workflow for managing the SQL queries and analysis of their big data environments, the team at Pinterest created Querybook. In this episode Justin Mejorada-Pier and Charlie Gu share the story of how the initial prototype for a data catalog ended up as one of their most widely used interfaces to their analytical data. They also discuss the unique combination of features that it offers, how it is implemented, and the path to releasing it as open source. Querybook is an impressive and unique piece of technology that is well worth exploring, 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! Firebolt is the fastest cloud data warehouse. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/firebolt to get started. The first 25 visitors will receive a Firebolt t-shirt. 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 Justin Mejorada-Pier and Charlie Gu about Querybook, an open source IDE for your big data projects

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Querybook is and the story behind it? What are the main use cases or workflows that Querybook is designed for?

What are the shortcomings of dashboarding/BI tools that make something like Querybook necessary?

The tag line calls out the fact that Querybook is an IDE for "big data". What are the manifestations of that focus in the feature set and user experience? Who are the target users of Querybook and how does that inform the feature priorities and user experience? Can you describe how Querybook is architected?

How have the goals and design changed or evolved since you first began working on it? What were some of the assumptions or design choices that you had to unwind in the process of open sourcing it?

What is the workflow for someone building a DataDoc with Querybook?

What is the experience of working as a collaborator on an analysis?

How do you handle lifecycle management of query results? What are your thoughts on the potential for extending Querybook beyond SQL-oriented analysis and integrating something like Jupyter kernels? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Querybook used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Querybook? When is Querybook the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Querybook?

Contact Info

Justin

Link

In this episode of DataFramed, Adel speaks with Sergey Fogelson, Vice President of Data Science and Modeling at Viacom on how data science has evolved over the past decade, and the remaining large-scale challenges facing data teams today.

Throughout the episode, Sergey deep-dives into his background, the various projects he’s been involved with throughout his career, the most exciting advances he’s seen in the data science space, the largest challenges facing data teams today, best practices democratizing data, the importance of learning SQL, and more. 

Relevant links from the interview:

Connect with Sergey on LinkedInCheck out Sergey’s course on DataCampLearn more about AirflowLearn more about PySparkLearn more about SQL

More resources from DataCamp

Upskill your team with DataCampOur Guide on Open Source Software in Data ScienceYour Organization’s Guide to Data Maturity

Summary The data warehouse has become the focal point of the modern data platform. With increased usage of data across businesses, and a diversity of locations and environments where data needs to be managed, the warehouse engine needs to be fast and easy to manage. Yellowbrick is a data warehouse platform that was built from the ground up for speed, and can work across clouds and all the way to the edge. In this episode CTO Mark Cusack explains how the engine is architected, the benefits that speed and predictable pricing has for the organization, and how you can simplify your platform by putting the warehouse close to the data, instead of the other way around.

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! Firebolt is the fastest cloud data warehouse. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/firebolt to get started. The first 25 visitors will receive a Firebolt t-shirt. 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 Mark Cusack about Yellowbrick, a data warehouse designed for distributed clouds

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what Yellowbrick is and some of the story behind it? What does the term "distributed cloud" signify and what challenges are associated with it? How would you characterize Yellowbrick’s position in the database/DWH market? How is Yellowbrick architected?

How have the goals and design of the platform changed or evolved over time?

How does Yellowbrick maintain visibility across the different data locations that it is responsible for?

What capabilities does it offer for being able to join across the disparate "clouds"?

What are some data modeling strategies that users should consider when designing their deployment of Yellowbrick? What are some of the capabilities of Yellowbrick that you find most useful or technically interesting? For someone who is adopting Yellowbrick, what is the process for getting it integrated into their data systems? What are the most underutilized, overlooked, or misunderstood features of Yellowbrick? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Yellowbrick used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on and with Yellowbrick? When is Yellowbrick the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of the product?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @markcusack on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

Yellowbrick Teradata Rainstor Distributed Cloud Hybrid Cloud SwimOS

Podcast Episode

K

We talked about:

Tatiana’s background 12 career hacks and changing career Hack #1: Change your social circle Hack #2: Forget your fears and stereotypes Hack #3: Forget distractions Hack #4: Don’t overestimate others and don’t underestimate yourself Hack #5: Attention genius Hack #6: Make a team Hack #7: Less is more. Forget about perfectionism Hack #8: Initial creation Hack #9: Find mentors Hack #10: Say “no” Hack #11: Look for failures Hack #12: Take care of yourself Kaggle vs internships and pet projects Resources for learning machine learning Starting with Kaggle Improving focus Astroinformatics How background in Physics is helpful for transitioning Leaving academia Preparing for interviews

Links:

Mock interviews: https://www.pramp.com/ Learning ML: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning and https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning Python: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning-with-python  SQL: https://www.sqlhabit.com/  Practice: https://www.kaggle.com/ MIT 6.006: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.006/fall11/notes.shtml Coding: https://leetcode.com/ System design: https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview Ukrainian telegram groups for interview preparation: https://t.me/FaangInterviewChannel,  https://t.me/FaangTechInterview, https://t.me/FloodInterview

Join DataTalks.Club: https://datatalks.club/slack.html

Summary There is a lot of attention on the database market and cloud data warehouses. While they provide a measure of convenience, they also require you to sacrifice a certain amount of control over your data. If you want to build a warehouse that gives you both control and flexibility then you might consider building on top of the venerable PostgreSQL project. In this episode Thomas Richter and Joshua Drake share their advice on how to build a production ready data warehouse with Postgres.

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! Firebolt is the fastest cloud data warehouse. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/firebolt to get started. The first 25 visitors will receive a Firebolt t-shirt. 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 Thomas Richter and Joshua Drake about using Postgres as your data warehouse

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by establishing a working definition of what constitutes a data warehouse for the purpose of this discussion?

What are the limitations for out-of-the-box Postgres when trying to use it for these workloads?

There are a large and growing number of options for data warehouse style workloads. How would you categorize the different systems and what is PostgreSQL’s position in that ecosystem?

What do you see as the motivating factors for a team or organization to select from among those categories?

Why would someone want to use Postgres as their data warehouse platform rather than using a purpose-built engine? What is the cost/performance equation for Postgres as compared to other data warehouse solutions? For someone who wants to turn Postgres into a data warehouse engine, what are their options?

What are the relative tradeoffs of the different open source and commercial offerings? (e.g. Citus, cstore_fdw, zedstore, Swarm64, Greenplum, etc.)

One of the biggest areas of growth right now is in the "cloud data warehouse" market where storage and compute are decoupled. What are the options for making that possible with Postgres? (e.g. using foreign data wrappers for interacting with data lake storage (S3, HDFS, Alluxio, etc.)) What areas of work are happening in the Postgres community for upcoming releases to make it more easily suited to data warehouse/analytical workloads? What are some of the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Postgres used in analytical contexts? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned from your own experiences of building analytical systems with Postgres? When is Postgres the wrong choice fo

Summary Spark is one of the most well-known frameworks for data processing, whether for batch or streaming, ETL or ML, and at any scale. Because of its popularity it has been deployed on every kind of platform you can think of. In this episode Jean-Yves Stephan shares the work that he is doing at Data Mechanics to make it sing on Kubernetes. He explains how operating in a cloud-native context simplifies some aspects of running the system while complicating others, how it simplifies the development and experimentation cycle, and how you can get a head start using their pre-built Spark container. This is a great conversation for understanding how new ways of operating systems can have broader impacts on how they are being used.

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! Firebolt is the fastest cloud data warehouse. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/firebolt to get started. The first 25 visitors will receive a Firebolt t-shirt. 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 Jean-Yves Stephan about Data Mechanics, a cloud-native Spark platform for data engineers

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of what you are building at Data Mechanics and the story behind it? What are the operational characteristics of Spark that make it difficult to run in a cloud-optimized environment? How do you handle retries, state redistribution, etc. when instances get pre-empted during the middle of a job execution?

What are some of the tactics that you have found useful when designing jobs to make them more resilient to interruptions?

What are the customizations that you have had to make to Spark itself? What are some of the supporting tools that you have built to allow for running Spark in a Kubernetes environment? How is the Data Mechanics platform implemented?

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

How does running Spark in a container/Kubernetes environment change the ways that you and your customers think about how and where to use it?

How does it impact the development workflow for data engineers and data scientists?

What are some of the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while building the Data Mechanics product? When is Spark/Data Mechanics the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of the platform?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Data Mechanics Databricks Stanford Andrew Ng Mining Massive Datasets Spark Kubernetes Spot Instances Infiniband Data Mechanics Spark Container Image Delight – Spark monitoring utility Terraform Blue/Green Deployment Spark Operator for Kubernetes JupyterHub Jupyter Enterprise Gateway

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Write optimized queries. This book helps you write queries that perform fast and deliver results on time. You will learn that query optimization is not a dark art practiced by a small, secretive cabal of sorcerers. Any motivated professional can learn to write efficient queries from the get-go and capably optimize existing queries. You will learn to look at the process of writing a query from the database engine’s point of view, and know how to think like the database optimizer. The book begins with a discussion of what a performant system is and progresses to measuring performance and setting performance goals. It introduces different classes of queries and optimization techniques suitable to each, such as the use of indexes and specific join algorithms. You will learn to read and understand query execution plans along with techniques for influencing those plans for better performance. The book also covers advanced topics such as the use of functions and procedures, dynamic SQL, and generated queries. All of these techniques are then used together to produce performant applications, avoiding the pitfalls of object-relational mappers. What You Will Learn Identify optimization goals in OLTP and OLAP systems Read and understand PostgreSQL execution plans Distinguish between short queries and long queries Choose the right optimization technique for each query type Identify indexes that will improve query performance Optimize full table scans Avoid the pitfalls of object-relational mapping systems Optimize the entire application rather than just database queries Who This Book Is For IT professionals working in PostgreSQL who want to develop performant and scalable applications, anyone whosejob title contains the words “database developer” or “database administrator" or who is a backend developer charged with programming database calls, and system architects involved in the overall design of application systems running against a PostgreSQL database

Perform fast interactive analytics against different data sources using the Trino high-performance distributed SQL query engine. With this practical guide, you'll learn how to conduct analytics on data where it lives, whether it's Hive, Cassandra, a relational database, or a proprietary data store. Analysts, software engineers, and production engineers will learn how to manage, use, and even develop with Trino. Initially developed by Facebook, open source Trino is now used by Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, Lyft, Netflix, Pinterest, Salesforce, Shopify, and many other companies. Matt Fuller, Manfred Moser, and Martin Traverso show you how a single Trino query can combine data from multiple sources to allow for analytics across your entire organization. Get started: Explore Trino's use cases and learn about tools that will help you connect to Trino and query data Go deeper: Learn Trino's internal workings, including how to connect to and query data sources with support for SQL statements, operators, functions, and more Put Trino in production: Secure Trino, monitor workloads, tune queries, and connect more applications; learn how other organizations apply Trino

Get started using Apache Spark via C# or F# and the .NET for Apache Spark bindings. This book is an introduction to both Apache Spark and the .NET bindings. Readers new to Apache Spark will get up to speed quickly using Spark for data processing tasks performed against large and very large datasets. You will learn how to combine your knowledge of .NET with Apache Spark to bring massive computing power to bear by distributed processing of extremely large datasets across multiple servers. This book covers how to get a local instance of Apache Spark running on your developer machine and shows you how to create your first .NET program that uses the Microsoft .NET bindings for Apache Spark. Techniques shown in the book allow you to use Apache Spark to distribute your data processing tasks over multiple compute nodes. You will learn to process data using both batch mode and streaming mode so you can make the right choice depending on whether you are processing an existing dataset or are working against new records in micro-batches as they arrive. The goal of the book is leave you comfortable in bringing the power of Apache Spark to your favorite .NET language. What You Will Learn Install and configure Spark .NET on Windows, Linux, and macOS Write Apache Spark programs in C# and F# using the .NET bindings Access and invoke the Apache Spark APIs from .NET with the same high performance as Python, Scala, and R Encapsulate functionality in user-defined functions Transform and aggregate large datasets Execute SQL queries against files through Apache Hive Distribute processing of large datasets across multiple servers Create your own batch, streaming, and machine learning programs Who This Book Is For .NETdevelopers who want to perform big data processing without having to migrate to Python, Scala, or R; and Apache Spark developers who want to run natively on .NET and take advantage of the C# and F# ecosystems

Understand the newest trend in database programming for developers working in Java, Kotlin, Clojure, and other JVM-based languages. This book introduces Reactive Relational Database Connectivity (R2DBC), a modern way of connecting to and querying relational databases from Java and other JVM languages. The book begins by helping you understand not only what reactive programming is, but why it is necessary. Then building on those fundamentals, the book takes you into the world of databases and the newly released Reactive Relational Database Connectivity (R2DBC) specification. Examples in the book are worked using the freely available MariaDB database along with MariaDB’s vendor-implementation of the R2DBC service-provider interface (SPI). Following along with the examples and the provided example code helps prepare you to work with any of the growing number of R2DBC implementations for popular enterprise databases such as Oracle Database and SQL Server. You’ll be well prepared for what is becoming the future of database access from Java and other languages built on the JVM. What You Will Learn Understand why R2DBC was created and how it utilizes the Reactive Streams API Understand the components of the R2DBC service-provider interface Create and manage reactive database connections and connection pools using an R2DBC client Programmatically execute queries on a relational database using an R2DBC client Effectively utilize transactions using an R2DBC client Build relational database-driven applications that are event-driven and non-blocking Who This Book Is For Software developers building solutions using JVM languages and the JVM ecosystem, and developers who need an introduction to the R2DBC specification and reactive programming with relational databases and want to understand what Reactive Relational Database Connectivity is and why it came about. This book includes practical examples of using the R2DBC specification with Java and MariaDB that will provide developers with the knowledge they need to create their own solutions.

Dive into the intricacies of data cleaning, a crucial aspect of any data science and machine learning pipeline, with 'Cleaning Data for Effective Data Science.' This comprehensive guide walks you through tools and methodologies like Python, R, and command-line utilities to prepare raw data for analysis. Learn practical strategies to manage, clean, and refine data encountered in the real world. What this Book will help me do Understand and utilize various data formats such as JSON, SQL, and PDF for data ingestion and processing. Master key tools like pandas, SciPy, and Tidyverse to manipulate and analyze datasets efficiently. Develop heuristics and methodologies for assessing data quality, detecting bias, and identifying irregularities. Apply advanced techniques like feature engineering and statistical adjustments to enhance data usability. Gain confidence in handling time series data by employing methods for de-trending and interpolating missing values. Author(s) David Mertz has years of experience as a Python programmer and data scientist. Known for his engaging and accessible teaching style, David has authored numerous technical articles and books. He emphasizes not only the technicalities of data science tools but also the critical thinking that approaches solutions creatively and effectively. Who is it for? 'Cleaning Data for Effective Data Science' is designed for data scientists, software developers, and educators dealing with data preparation. Whether you're an aspiring data enthusiast or an experienced professional looking to refine your skills, this book provides essential tools and frameworks. Prior programming knowledge, particularly in Python or R, coupled with an understanding of statistical fundamentals, will help you make the most of this resource.

Transform the way your business works with easy-to-build apps. With this updated and expanded second edition, you can build business apps that work with your company's systems and databases, without having to enlist the expertise of costly, professionally trained software developers. In this new edition, business applications expert Tim Leung offers step-by-step guidance on how you can improve all areas of your business. He shows how you can replace manual or paper processes with modern apps that run on phone or tablet devices. For administrative and back-office operations, he covers how to build apps with workflow and dashboard capabilities. To facilitate collaboration with customers and clients, you’ll learn how to build secure web portals with data entry capabilities, including how to customize those portals with code. This hands-on new edition has 10 new chapters—including coverage on model-driven and portal apps, artificial intelligence, building components using the Power Apps Component Framework, using PowerShell for administration, and more—complete with context, explanatory screenshots, and non-technical terminology. What You Will Learn Create offline capable mobile apps and responsive web apps Carry out logic, data access, and data entry through formulas Embellish apps with charting, file handling, photo, barcode, and location features Set up Common Data Service, SharePoint, and SQL data sources Use AI to predict outcomes, recognize images, and analyze sentiment Integrate apps with external web services and automate tasks with Power Automate Build reusable code and canvas components, make customizations with JavaScript Transfer apps and data, and secure, administer, and monitor Power Apps environments Who This Book Is For Beginners and non-developers, and assumes no prior knowledge of Power Apps