Data Engineering Podcast

The world of business is becoming increasingly dependent on information that is accurate up to the minute. For analytical systems, the only way to provide this reliably is by implementing change data capture (CDC). Unfortunately, this is a non-trivial undertaking, particularly for teams that don't have extensive experience working with streaming data and complex distributed systems. In this episode Raghu Murthy, founder and CEO of Datacoral, does a deep dive on how he and his team manage change data capture pipelines in production.

The team at DoorDash has a complex set of optimization challenges to deal with using data that they collect from a multi-sided marketplace. In order to handle the volume and variety of information that they use to run and improve the business the data team has to build a platform that analysts and data scientists can use in a self-service manner. In this episode the head of data platform for DoorDash, Sudhir Tonse, discusses the technologies that they are using, the approach that they take to adding new systems, and how they think about priorities for what to support for the whole company vs what to leave as a specialized concern for a single team. This is a valuable look at how to manage a large and growing data platform with that supports a variety of teams with varied and evolving needs.

A majority of the time spent in data engineering is copying data between systems to make the information available for different purposes. This introduces challenges such as keeping information synchronized, managing schema evolution, building transformations to match the expectations of the destination systems. H.O. Maycotte was faced with these same challenges but at a massive scale, leading him to question if there is a better way. After tasking some of his top engineers to consider the problem in a new light they created the Pilosa engine. In this episode H.O. explains how using Pilosa as the core he built the Molecula platform to eliminate the need to copy data between systems in able to make it accessible for analytical and machine learning purposes. He also discusses the challenges that he faces in helping potential users and customers understand the shift in thinking that this creates, and how the system is architected to make it possible. This is a fascinating conversation about what the future looks like when you revisit your assumptions about how systems are designed.

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

Data integration is a critical piece of every data pipeline, yet it is still far from being a solved problem. There are a number of managed platforms available, but the list of options for an open source system that supports a large variety of sources and destinations is still embarrasingly short. The team at Airbyte is adding a new entry to that list with the goal of making robust and easy to use data integration more accessible to teams who want or need to maintain full control of their data. In this episode co-founders John Lafleur and Michel Tricot share the story of how and why they created Airbyte, discuss the project's design and architecture, and explain their vision of what an open soure data integration platform should offer. If you are struggling to maintain your extract and load pipelines or spending time on integrating with a new system when you would prefer to be working on other projects then this is definitely a conversation worth listening to.

Every business aims to be data driven, but not all of them succeed in that effort. In order to be able to truly derive insights from the data that an organization collects, there are certain foundational capabilities that they need to have capacity for. In order to help more businesses build those foundations, Tarush Aggarwal created 5xData, offering collaborative workshops to assist in setting up the technical and organizational systems that are necessary to succeed. In this episode he shares his thoughts on the core elements that are necessary for every business to be data driven, how he is helping companies incorporate those capabilities into their structure, and the ongoing support that he is providing through a network of mastermind groups. This is a great conversation about the initial steps that every group should be thinking of as they start down the road to making data informed decisions.

With all of the tools and services available for building a data platform it can be difficult to separate the signal from the noise. One of the best ways to get a true understanding of how a technology works in practice is to hear from people who are running it in production. In this episode Zeeshan Qureshi and Michelle Ark share their experiences using DBT to manage the data warehouse for Shopify. They explain how the structured the project to allow for multiple teams to collaborate in a scalable manner, the additional tooling that they added to address the edge cases that they have run into, and the optimizations that they baked into their continuous integration process to provide fast feedback and reduce costs. This is a great conversation about the lessons learned from real world use of a specific technology and how well it lives up to its promises.

Collecting and processing metrics for monitoring use cases is an interesting data problem. It is eminently possible to generate millions or billions of data points per second, the information needs to be propagated to a central location, processed, and analyzed in timeframes on the order of milliseconds or single-digit seconds, and the consumers of the data need to be able to query the information quickly and flexibly. As the systems that we build continue to grow in scale and complexity the need for reliable and manageable monitoring platforms increases proportionately. In this episode Rob Skillington, CTO of Chronosphere, shares his experiences building metrics systems that provide observability to companies that are operating at extreme scale. He describes how the M3DB storage engine is designed to manage the pressures of a critical system component, the inherent complexities of working with telemetry data, and the motivating factors that are contributing to the growing need for flexibility in querying the collected metrics. This is a fascinating conversation about an area of data management that is often taken for granted.

Businesses often need to be able to ingest data from their customers in order to power the services that they provide. For each new source that they need to integrate with it is another custom set of ETL tasks that they need to maintain. In order to reduce the friction involved in supporting new data transformations David Molot and Hassan Syyid built the Hotlue platform. In this episode they describe the data integration challenges facing many B2B companies, how their work on the Hotglue platform simplifies their efforts, and how they have designed the platform to make these ETL workloads embeddable and self service for end users.

The data warehouse has become the central component of the modern data stack. Building on this pattern, the team at Hightouch have created a platform that synchronizes information about your customers out to third party systems for use by marketing and sales teams. In this episode Tejas Manohar explains the benefits of sourcing customer data from one location for all of your organization to use, the technical challenges of synchronizing the data to external systems with varying APIs, and the workflow for enabling self-service access to your customer data by your marketing teams. This is an interesting conversation about the importance of the data warehouse and how it can be used beyond just internal analytics.

As data professionals we have a number of tools available for storing, processing, and analyzing data. We also have tools for collaborating on software and analysis, but collaborating on data is still an underserved capability. Gavin Mendel-Gleason encountered this problem first hand while working on the Sesshat databank, leading him to create TerminusDB and TerminusHub. In this episode he explains how the TerminusDB system is architected to provide a versioned graph storage engine that allows for branching and merging of data sets, how that opens up new possibilities for individuals and teams to work together on building new data repositories. This is a fascinating conversation on the technical challenges involved, the opportunities that such as system provides, and the complexities inherent to building a successful business on open source.

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

One of the core responsibilities of data engineers is to manage the security of the information that they process. The team at Satori has a background in cybersecurity and they are using the lessons that they learned in that field to address the challenge of access control and auditing for data governance. In this episode co-founder and CTO Yoav Cohen explains how the Satori platform provides a proxy layer for your data, the challenges of managing security across disparate storage systems, and their approach to building a dynamic data catalog based on the records that your organization is actually using. This is an interesting conversation about the intersection of data and security and the lessons that can be learned in each direction.

Data governance is a term that encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, both technical and process oriented. One of the more complex aspects is that of access control to the data assets that an organization is responsible for managing. The team at Immuta has built a platform that aims to tackle that problem in a flexible and maintainable fashion so that data teams can easily integrate authorization, data masking, and privacy enhancing technologies into their data infrastructure. In this episode Steve Touw and Stephen Bailey share what they have built at Immuta, how it is implemented, and how it streamlines the workflow for everyone involved in working with sensitive data. If you are starting down the path of implementing a data governance strategy then this episode will provide a great overview of what is involved.

As a data engineer you're familiar with the process of collecting data from databases, customer data platforms, APIs, etc. At YipitData they rely on a variety of alternative data sources to inform investment decisions by hedge funds and businesses. In this episode Andrew Gross, Bobby Muldoon, and Anup Segu describe the self service data platform that they have built to allow data analysts to own the end-to-end delivery of data projects and how that has allowed them to scale their output. They share the journey that they went through to build a scalable and maintainable system for web scraping, how to make it reliable and resilient to errors, and the lessons that they learned in the process. This was a great conversation about real world experiences in building a successful data-oriented business.