Data Engineering Podcast

A significant portion of the time spent by data engineering teams is on managing the workflows and operations of their pipelines. DataOps has arisen as a parallel set of practices to that of DevOps teams as a means of reducing wasted effort. Agile Data Engine is a platform designed to handle the infrastructure side of the DataOps equation, as well as providing the insights that you need to manage the human side of the workflow...

Building a data team is hard in any circumstance, but at a startup it can be even more challenging. The requirements are fluid, you probably don't have a lot of existing data talent to manage the hiring and onboarding, and there is a need to move fast. Ghalib Suleiman has been on both sides of this equation and joins the show to share his hard-won wisdom about how to start and grow a data team in the early days of company growth.

Batch vs. streaming is a long running debate in the world of data integration and transformation. Proponents of the streaming paradigm argue that stream processing engines can easily handle batched workloads, but the reverse isn't true. The batch world has been the default for years because of the complexities of running a reliable streaming system at scale...

All of the advancements in our technology is based around the principles of abstraction. These are valuable until they break down, which is an inevitable occurrence. In this episode the host Tobias Macey shares his reflections on recent experiences where the abstractions leaked and some observances on how to deal with that situation in a data platform architecture.

Every business has customers, and a critical element of success is understanding who they are and how they are using the companies products or services. The challenge is that most companies have a multitude of systems that contain fragments of the customer's interactions and stitching that together is complex and time consuming. Segment created the Unify product to reduce the burden of building a comprehensive view of customers and synchronizing it to all of the systems that need it...

Real-time capabilities have quickly become an expectation for consumers. The complexity of providing those capabilities is still high, however, making it more difficult for small teams to compete. Meroxa was created to enable teams of all sizes to deliver real-time data applications. In this episode DeVaris Brown discusses the types of applications that are possible when teams don't have to manage the complex infrastructure necessary to support continuous data flows.

Business intellingence has been chasing the promise of self-serve data for decades. As the capabilities of these systems has improved and become more accessible, the target of what self-serve means changes. With the availability of AI powered by large language models combined with the evolution of semantic layers, the team at Zenlytic have taken aim at this problem again...

The customer data platform is a category of services that was developed early in the evolution of the current era of cloud services for data processing. When it was difficult to wire together the event collection, data modeling, reporting, and activation it made sense to buy monolithic products that handled every stage of the customer data lifecycle. Now that the data warehouse has taken center stage a new approach of composable customer data platforms is emerging...

The data ecosystem has been building momentum for several years now. As a venture capital investor Matt Turck has been trying to keep track of the main trends and has compiled his findings into the MAD (ML, AI, and Data) landscape reports each year. In this episode he shares his experiences building those reports and the perspective he has gained from the exercise.

The promise of streaming data is that it allows you to react to new information as it happens, rather than introducing latency by batching records together. The peril is that building a robust and scalable streaming architecture is always more complicated and error-prone than you think it's going to be. After experiencing this unfortunate reality for themselves, Abhishek Chauhan and Ashish Kumar founded Grainite so that you don't have to suffer the same pain...