This week on The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas talk with Jim Walker, the VP of product marketing at Cockroach Labs, about distributed systems, competing against the speed of light, and making data easy.

Highlights from this week's episode include: 

• Jim background of translating deep technical concepts into understandable English and his work at Cockroach Labs (2:23)
• The origin of Cockroach Labs and distributed SQL (6:10) 
• Living without Atomic Clocks (10:10)
• Having the speed of light as the ultimate competitor (13:49)
• CockroachDB’s users (19:35)
• Figuring out big data for transactions (25:14)
• Dealing with failure (35:04)
• Open source code, community, and consumption (39:26)
• Making data easy, and what's next for Cockroach (43:12)
• Bringing programming into marketing (46:18)

Mentioned Links:

• Spanner White Paper
• Raft & Paxos
• Michael Stonebraker 

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.