Data Engineering Podcast

One of the critical components for modern data infrastructure is a scalable and reliable messaging system. Publish-subscribe systems have been popular for many years, and recently stream oriented systems such as Kafka have been rising in prominence. This week Rajan Dhabalia and Matteo Merli discuss the work they have done on Pulsar, which supports both options, in addition to being globally scalable and fast. They explain how Pulsar is architected, how to scale it, and how it fits into your existing infrastructure.

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

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Sharing data across multiple computers, particularly when it is large and changing, is a difficult problem to solve. In order to provide a simpler way to distribute and version data sets among collaborators the Dat Project was created. In this episode Danielle Robinson and Joe Hand explain how the project got started, how it functions, and some of the many ways that it can be used. They also explain the plans that the team has for upcoming features and uses that you can watch out for in future releases.

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

The majority of the conversation around machine learning and big data pertains to well-structured and cleaned data sets. Unfortunately, that is just a small percentage of the information that is available, so the rest of the sources of knowledge in a company are housed in so-called “Dark Data” sets. In this episode Alex Ratner explains how the work that he and his fellow researchers are doing on Snorkel can be used to extract value by leveraging labeling functions written by domain experts to generate training sets for machine learning models. He also explains how this approach can be used to democratize machine learning by making it feasible for organizations with smaller data sets than those required by most tooling.

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

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As we scale our systems to handle larger volumes of data, geographically distributed users, and varied data sources the requirement to distribute the computational resources for managing that information becomes more pronounced. In order to ensure that all of the distributed nodes in our systems agree with each other we need to build mechanisms to properly handle replication of data and conflict resolution. In this episode Christopher Meiklejohn discusses the research he is doing with Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) and how they fit in with existing methods for sharing and sharding data. He also shares resources for systems that leverage CRDTs, how you can incorporate them into your systems, and when they might not be the right solution. It is a fascinating and informative treatment of a topic that is becoming increasingly relevant in a data driven world.

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

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PostGreSQL has become one of the most popular and widely used databases, and for good reason. The level of extensibility that it supports has allowed it to be used in virtually every environment. At Citus Data they have built an extension to support running it in a distributed fashion across large volumes of data with parallelized queries for improved performance. In this episode Ozgun Erdogan, the CTO of Citus, and Craig Kerstiens, Citus Product Manager, discuss how the company got started, the work that they are doing to scale out PostGreSQL, and how you can start using it in your environment.

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

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Data oriented applications that need to operate on large, fast-moving sterams of information can be difficult to build and scale due to the need to manage their state. In this episode Sean T. Allen, VP of engineering for Wallaroo Labs, explains how Wallaroo was designed and built to reduce the cognitive overhead of building this style of project. He explains the motivation for building Wallaroo, how it is implemented, and how you can start using it today.

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

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Time series databases have long been the cornerstone of a robust metrics system, but the existing options are often difficult to manage in production. In this episode Jeroen van der Heijden explains his motivation for writing a new database, SiriDB, the challenges that he faced in doing so, and how it works under the hood.

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

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To process your data you need to know what shape it has, which is why schemas are important. When you are processing that data in multiple systems it can be difficult to ensure that they all have an accurate representation of that schema, which is why Confluent has built a schema registry that plugs into Kafka. In this episode Ewen Cheslack-Postava explains what the schema registry is, how it can be used, and how they built it. He also discusses how it can be extended for other deployment targets and use cases, and additional features that are planned for future releases.

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

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We have tools and platforms for collaborating on software projects and linking them together, wouldn’t it be nice to have the same capabilities for data? The team at data.world are working on building a platform to host and share data sets for public and private use that can be linked together to build a semantic web of information. The CTO, Bryon Jacob, discusses how the company got started, their mission, and how they have built and evolved their technical infrastructure.

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

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With the wealth of formats for sending and storing data it can be difficult to determine which one to use. In this episode Doug Cutting, creator of Avro, and Julien Le Dem, creator of Parquet, dig into the different classes of serialization formats, what their strengths are, and how to choose one for your workload. They also discuss the role of Arrow as a mechanism for in-memory data sharing and how hardware evolution will influence the state of the art for data formats.

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

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