Summary In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast Kacper Łukawski from Qdrant about integrating MCP servers with vector databases to process unstructured data. Kacper shares his experience in data engineering, from building big data pipelines in the automotive industry to leveraging large language models (LLMs) for transforming unstructured datasets into valuable assets. He discusses the challenges of building data pipelines for unstructured data and how vector databases facilitate semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications. Kacper delves into the intricacies of vector storage and search, including metadata and contextual elements, and explores the evolution of vector engines beyond RAG to applications like semantic search and anomaly detection. The conversation covers the role of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers in simplifying data integration and retrieval processes, highlighting the need for experimentation and evaluation when adopting LLMs, and offering practical advice on optimizing vector search costs and fine-tuning embedding models for improved search quality.

Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData migrations are brutal. They drag on for months—sometimes years—burning through resources and crushing team morale. Datafold's AI-powered Migration Agent changes all that. Their unique combination of AI code translation and automated data validation has helped companies complete migrations up to 10 times faster than manual approaches. And they're so confident in their solution, they'll actually guarantee your timeline in writing. Ready to turn your year-long migration into weeks? Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today for the details.Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Kacper Łukawski about how MCP servers can be paired with vector databases to streamline processing of unstructured dataInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?LLMs are enabling the derivation of useful data assets from unstructured sources. What are the challenges that teams face in building the pipelines to support that work?How has the role of vector engines grown or evolved in the past ~2 years as LLMs have gained broader adoption?Beyond its role as a store of context for agents, RAG, etc. what other applications are common for vector databaes?In the ecosystem of vector engines, what are the distinctive elements of Qdrant?How has the MCP specification simplified the work of processing unstructured data?Can you describe the toolchain and workflow involved in building a data pipeline that leverages an MCP for generating embeddings?helping data engineers gain confidence in non-deterministic workflowsbringing application/ML/data teams into collaboration for determining the impact of e.g. chunking strategies, embedding model selection, etc.What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen MCP and Qdrant used?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on vector use cases?When is MCP and/or Qdrant the wrong choice?What do you have planned for the future of MCP with Qdrant?Contact Info LinkedInTwitter/XPersonal websiteParting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected] with your story.Links QdrantKafkaApache OoziNamed Entity RecognitionGraphRAGpgvectorElasticsearchApache LuceneOpenSearchBM25Semantic SearchMCP == Model Context ProtocolAnthropic Contextualized ChunkingCohereThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Summary In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast Alex Albu, tech lead for AI initiatives at Starburst, talks about integrating AI workloads with the lakehouse architecture. From his software engineering roots to leading data engineering efforts, Alex shares insights on enhancing Starburst's platform to support AI applications, including an AI agent for data exploration and using AI for metadata enrichment and workload optimization. He discusses the challenges of integrating AI with data systems, innovations like SQL functions for AI tasks and vector databases, and the limitations of traditional architectures in handling AI workloads. Alex also shares his vision for the future of Starburst, including support for new data formats and AI-driven data exploration tools.

Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData migrations are brutal. They drag on for months—sometimes years—burning through resources and crushing team morale. Datafold's AI-powered Migration Agent changes all that. Their unique combination of AI code translation and automated data validation has helped companies complete migrations up to 10 times faster than manual approaches. And they're so confident in their solution, they'll actually guarantee your timeline in writing. Ready to turn your year-long migration into weeks? Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today for the details.This is a pharmaceutical Ad for Soda Data Quality. Do you suffer from chronic dashboard distrust? Are broken pipelines and silent schema changes wreaking havoc on your analytics? You may be experiencing symptoms of Undiagnosed Data Quality Syndrome — also known as UDQS. Ask your data team about Soda. With Soda Metrics Observability, you can track the health of your KPIs and metrics across the business — automatically detecting anomalies before your CEO does. It’s 70% more accurate than industry benchmarks, and the fastest in the category, analyzing 1.1 billion rows in just 64 seconds. And with Collaborative Data Contracts, engineers and business can finally agree on what “done” looks like — so you can stop fighting over column names, and start trusting your data again.Whether you’re a data engineer, analytics lead, or just someone who cries when a dashboard flatlines, Soda may be right for you. Side effects of implementing Soda may include: Increased trust in your metrics, reduced late-night Slack emergencies, spontaneous high-fives across departments, fewer meetings and less back-and-forth with business stakeholders, and in rare cases, a newfound love of data. Sign up today to get a chance to win a $1000+ custom mechanical keyboard. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/soda to sign up and follow Soda’s launch week. It starts June 9th. This episode is brought to you by Coresignal, your go-to source for high-quality public web data to power best-in-class AI products. Instead of spending time collecting, cleaning, and enriching data in-house, use ready-made multi-source B2B data that can be smoothly integrated into your systems via APIs or as datasets. With over 3 billion data records from 15+ online sources, Coresignal delivers high-quality data on companies, employees, and jobs. It is powering decision-making for more than 700 companies across AI, investment, HR tech, sales tech, and market intelligence industries. A founding member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative, Coresignal stands out not only for its data quality but also for its commitment to responsible data collection practices. Recognized as the top data provider by Datarade for two consecutive years, Coresignal is the go-to partner for those who need fresh, accurate, and ethically sourced B2B data at scale. Discover how Coresignal's data can enhance your AI platforms. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/coresignal to start your free 14-day trial.Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Alex Albu about how Starburst is extending the lakehouse to support AI workloadsInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Can you start by outlining the interaction points of AI with the types of data workflows that you are supporting with Starburst?What are some of the limitations of warehouse and lakehouse systems when it comes to supporting AI systems?What are the points of friction for engineers who are trying to employ LLMs in the work of maintaining a lakehouse environment?Methods such as tool use (exemplified by MCP) are a means of bolting on AI models to systems like Trino. What are some of the ways that is insufficient or cumbersome?Can you describe the technical implementation of the AI-oriented features that you have incorporated into the Starburst platform?What are the foundational architectural modifications that you had to make to enable those capabilities?For the vector storage and indexing, what modifications did you have to make to iceberg?What was your reasoning for not using a format like Lance?For teams who are using Starburst and your new AI features, what are some examples of the workflows that they can expect?What new capabilities are enabled by virtue of embedding AI features into the interface to the lakehouse?What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Starburst AI features used?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on AI features for Starburst?When is Starburst/lakehouse the wrong choice for a given AI use case?What do you have planned for the future of AI on Starburst?Contact Info LinkedInParting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected] with your story.Links StarburstPodcast EpisodeAWS AthenaMCP == Model Context ProtocolLLM Tool UseVector EmbeddingsRAG == Retrieval Augmented GenerationAI Engineering Podcast EpisodeStarburst Data ProductsLanceLanceDBParquetORCpgvectorStarburst IcehouseThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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

Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData migrations are brutal. They drag on for months—sometimes years—burning through resources and crushing team morale. Datafold's AI-powered Migration Agent changes all that. Their unique combination of AI code translation and automated data validation has helped companies complete migrations up to 10 times faster than manual approaches. And they're so confident in their solution, they'll actually guarantee your timeline in writing. Ready to turn your year-long migration into weeks? Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today for the details. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Bartosz Mikulski about how to prepare data for use in AI applicationsInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Can you start by outlining some of the main categories of data assets that are needed for AI applications?How does the nature of the application change those requirements? (e.g. RAG app vs. agent, etc.)How do the different assets map to the stages of the application lifecycle?What are some of the common roles and divisions of responsibility that you see in the construction and operation of a "typical" AI application?For data engineers who are used to data warehousing/BI, what are the skills that map to AI apps?What are some of the data modeling patterns that are needed to support AI apps?chunking strategies metadata managementWhat are the new categories of data that data engineers need to manage in the context of AI applications?agent memory generation/evolution conversation history managementdata collection for fine tuningWhat are some of the notable evolutions in the space of AI applications and their patterns that have happened in the past ~1-2 years that relate to the responsibilities of data engineers?What are some of the skills gaps that teams should be aware of and identify training opportunities for?What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen data teams address the needs of AI applications?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on AI applications and their reliance on data?What are some of the emerging trends that you are paying particular attention to?Contact Info WebsiteLinkedInParting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected] with your story.Links SparkRayChunking StrategiesHypothetical document embeddingsModel Fine TuningPrompt CompressionThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Summary The rapid growth of generative AI applications has prompted a surge of investment in vector databases. While there are numerous engines available now, Lance is designed to integrate with data lake and lakehouse architectures. In this episode Weston Pace explains the inner workings of the Lance format for table definitions and file storage, and the optimizations that they have made to allow for fast random access and efficient schema evolution. In addition to integrating well with data lakes, Lance is also a first-class participant in the Arrow ecosystem, making it easy to use with your existing ML and AI toolchains. This is a fascinating conversation about a technology that is focused on expanding the range of options for working with vector data. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementImagine catching data issues before they snowball into bigger problems. That’s what Datafold’s new Monitors do. With automatic monitoring for cross-database data diffs, schema changes, key metrics, and custom data tests, you can catch discrepancies and anomalies in real time, right at the source. Whether it’s maintaining data integrity or preventing costly mistakes, Datafold Monitors give you the visibility and control you need to keep your entire data stack running smoothly. Want to stop issues before they hit production? Learn more at dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today!Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Weston Pace about the Lance file and table format for column-oriented vector storageInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Can you describe what Lance is and the story behind it?What are the core problems that Lance is designed to solve?What is explicitly out of scope?The README mentions that it is straightforward to convert to Lance from Parquet. What is the motivation for this compatibility/conversion support?What formats does Lance replace or obviate?In terms of data modeling Lance obviously adds a vector type, what are the features and constraints that engineers should be aware of when modeling their embeddings or arbitrary vectors?Are there any practical or hard limitations on vector dimensionality?When generating Lance files/datasets, what are some considerations to be aware of for balancing file/chunk sizes for I/O efficiency and random access in cloud storage?I noticed that the file specification has space for feature flags. How has that aided in enabling experimentation in new capabilities and optimizations?What are some of the engineering and design decisions that were most challenging and/or had the biggest impact on the performance and utility of Lance?The most obvious interface for reading and writing Lance files is through LanceDB. Can you describe the use cases that it focuses on and its notable features?What are the other main integrations for Lance?What are the opportunities or roadblocks in adding support for Lance and vector storage/indexes in e.g. Iceberg or Delta to enable its use in data lake environments?What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Lance used?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on the Lance format?When is Lance the wrong choice?What do you have planned for the future of Lance?Contact Info LinkedInGitHubParting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?Links Lance FormatLanceDBSubstraitPyArrowFAISSPineconePodcast EpisodeParquetIcebergPodcast EpisodeDelta LakePodcast EpisodePyLanceHilbert CurvesSIFT VectorsS3 ExpressWekaDataFusionRay DataTorch Data LoaderHNSW == Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds vector indexIVFPQ vector indexGeoJSONPolarsThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Summary Generative AI has rapidly gained adoption for numerous use cases. To support those applications, organizational data platforms need to add new features and data teams have increased responsibility. In this episode Lior Gavish, co-founder of Monte Carlo, discusses the various ways that data teams are evolving to support AI powered features and how they are incorporating AI into their work. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData lakes are notoriously complex. For data engineers who battle to build and scale high quality data workflows on the data lake, Starburst is an end-to-end data lakehouse platform built on Trino, the query engine Apache Iceberg was designed for, with complete support for all table formats including Apache Iceberg, Hive, and Delta Lake. Trusted by teams of all sizes, including Comcast and Doordash. Want to see Starburst in action? Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/starburst and get $500 in credits to try Starburst Galaxy today, the easiest and fastest way to get started using Trino.Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Lior Gavish about the impact of AI on data engineersInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Can you start by clarifying what we are discussing when we say "AI"?Previous generations of machine learning (e.g. deep learning, reinforcement learning, etc.) required new features in the data platform. What new demands is the current generation of AI introducing?Generative AI also has the potential to be incorporated in the creation/execution of data pipelines. What are the risk/reward tradeoffs that you have seen in practice?What are the areas where LLMs have proven useful/effective in data engineering?Vector embeddings have rapidly become a ubiquitous data format as a result of the growth in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for AI applications. What are the end-to-end operational requirements to support this use case effectively?As with all data, the reliability and quality of the vectors will impact the viability of the AI application. What are the different failure modes/quality metrics/error conditions that they are subject to?As much as vectors, vector databases, RAG, etc. seem exotic and new, it is all ultimately shades of the same work that we have been doing for years. What are the areas of overlap in the work required for running the current generation of AI, and what are the areas where it diverges?What new skills do data teams need to acquire to be effective in supporting AI applications?What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen AI impact data engineering teams?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working with the current generation of AI?When is AI the wrong choice?What are your predictions for the future impact of AI on data engineering teams?Contact Info LinkedInParting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected] with your Links Monte CarloPodcast EpisodeNLP == Natural Language ProcessingLarge Language ModelsGenerative AIMLOpsML EngineerFeature StoreRetrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)LangchainThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Summary

The rapid growth of machine learning, especially large language models, have led to a commensurate growth in the need to store and compare vectors. In this episode Louis Brandy discusses the applications for vector search capabilities both in and outside of AI, as well as the challenges of maintaining real-time indexes of vector data.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Introducing RudderStack Profiles. RudderStack Profiles takes the SaaS guesswork and SQL grunt work out of building complete customer profiles so you can quickly ship actionable, enriched data to every downstream team. You specify the customer traits, then Profiles runs the joins and computations for you to create complete customer profiles. Get all of the details and try the new product today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack This episode is brought to you by Datafold – a testing automation platform for data engineers that finds data quality issues before the code and data are deployed to production. Datafold leverages data-diffing to compare production and development environments and column-level lineage to show you the exact impact of every code change on data, metrics, and BI tools, keeping your team productive and stakeholders happy. Datafold integrates with dbt, the modern data stack, and seamlessly plugs in your data CI for team-wide and automated testing. If you are migrating to a modern data stack, Datafold can also help you automate data and code validation to speed up the migration. Learn more about Datafold by visiting dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold You shouldn't have to throw away the database to build with fast-changing data. You should be able to keep the familiarity of SQL and the proven architecture of cloud warehouses, but swap the decades-old batch computation model for an efficient incremental engine to get complex queries that are always up-to-date. With Materialize, you can! It’s the only true SQL streaming database built from the ground up to meet the needs of modern data products. Whether it’s real-time dashboarding and analytics, personalization and segmentation or automation and alerting, Materialize gives you the ability to work with fresh, correct, and scalable results — all in a familiar SQL interface. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/materialize today to get 2 weeks free! If you’re a data person, you probably have to jump between different tools to run queries, build visualizations, write Python, and send around a lot of spreadsheets and CSV files. Hex brings everything together. Its powerful notebook UI lets you analyze data in SQL, Python, or no-code, in any combination, and work together with live multiplayer and version control. And now, Hex’s magical AI tools can generate queries and code, create visualizations, and even kickstart a whole analysis for you – all from natural language prompts. It’s like having an analytics co-pilot built right into where you’re already doing your work. Then, when you’re ready to share, you can use Hex’s drag-and-drop app builder to configure beautiful reports or dashboards that anyone can use. Join the hundreds of data teams like Notion, AllTrails, Loom, Mixpanel and Algolia using Hex every day to make their work more impactful. Sign up today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hex to get a 30-day free trial of the Hex Team plan! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Louis Brandy about building vector indexes in real-time for analytics and AI applications

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what vector search is and how it differs from other search technologies?

What are the technical challenges related to providing vector search? What are the applications for vector search that merit the added complexity?

Vector databases have been gaining a lot of attention recently with the proliferation of LLM applicati

Summary

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

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Introducing RudderStack Profiles. RudderStack Profiles takes the SaaS guesswork and SQL grunt work out of building complete customer profiles so you can quickly ship actionable, enriched data to every downstream team. You specify the customer traits, then Profiles runs the joins and computations for you to create complete customer profiles. Get all of the details and try the new product today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Bob Muglia about his recent book about the idea of "Datapreneurs" and the role of data in the modern economy

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

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

Links

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

Podcast Episode

Databricks Unity Catalog RelationalAI 6th Normal Form Pinecone Vector DB

Podcast Episode

Perplexity AI

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

Introducing RudderStack Profiles. RudderStack Profiles takes the SaaS guesswork and SQL grunt work out of building complete customer profiles so you can quickly ship actionable, enriched data to every downstream team. You specify the customer traits, then Profiles runs the joins and computations for you to create complete customer profiles. Get all of the details and try the new product today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstackSupport Data Engineering Podcast

Summary The optimal format for storage and retrieval of data is dependent on how it is going to be used. For analytical systems there are decades of investment in data warehouses and various modeling techniques. For machine learning applications relational models require additional processing to be directly useful, which is why there has been a growth in the use of vector databases. These platforms store direct representations of the vector embeddings that machine learning models rely on for computing relevant predictions so that there is no additional processing required to go from input data to inference output. In this episode Frank Liu explains how the open source Milvus vector database is implemented to speed up machine learning development cycles, how to think about proper storage and scaling of these vectors, and how data engineering and machine learning teams can collaborate on the creation and maintenance of these data sets.

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 new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Data stacks are becoming more and more complex. This brings infinite possibilities for data pipelines to break and a host of other issues, severely deteriorating the quality of the data and causing teams to lose trust. Sifflet solves this problem by acting as an overseeing layer to the data stack – observing data and ensuring it’s reliable from ingestion all the way to consumption. Whether the data is in transit or at rest, Sifflet can detect data quality anomalies, assess business impact, identify the root cause, and alert data teams’ on their preferred channels. All thanks to 50+ quality checks, extensive column-level lineage, and 20+ connectors across the Data Stack. In addition, data discovery is made easy through Sifflet’s information-rich data catalog with a powerful search engine and real-time health statuses. Listeners of the podcast will get $2000 to use as platform credits when signing up to use Sifflet. Sifflet also offers a 2-week free trial. Find out more at dataengineeringpodcast.com/sifflet today! RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines

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

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Have you ever had to develop ad-hoc solutions for security, privacy, and compliance requirements? Are you spending too much of your engineering resources on creating database views, configuring database permissions, and manually granting and revoking access to sensitive data? Satori has built the first DataSecOps Platform that streamlines data access and security. Satori’s DataSecOps automates data access controls, permissions, and masking for all major data platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift and SQL Server and even delegates data access management to business users, helping you move your organization from default data access to need-to-know access. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/satori today and get a $5K credit for your next Satori subscription. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Davit Buniatyan about Activeloop, a platform for hosting and delivering datasets optimized for machine learning

Interview

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

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

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

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

Announcements

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Interview

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

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

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