Mark is joined by Qubit colleague Will Browne to talk about his recent academic paper co-authored with Mike Swarbrick Jones on what techniques are most successful in influencing and retaining eCommerce customers, using analytics and statistical analysis-at-scale to analyze and understand 20 billion user journeys held in Qubit's Google Cloud Platform-hosted Customer Data Store.

Mark is joined by returning special guest Dan McClary to talk about data modeling and database design on distributed query engines such as Google BigQuery, the underlying Dremel technology and Capacitor storage format that enables this cloud distributed data warehouse-as-a-service platform to scale to petabyte-size tables spanning tens of thousands of servers, and techniques to optimize BigQuery table joins using nested fields, table partitioning and denormalization .

Oracle's Jack Berkowitz joins Mark Rittman to talk about a new category of continuously adapting, self-learning applications being built-out by Oracle that use machine learning together with enterprise and third-party data to create a new generation of intelligent HR, CX, SCM and ERP SaaS apps.

Stewart Bryson returns to the show to join Mark Rittman to discuss new-world BI and data warehousing development using Google BigQuery and Amazon Athena, Apache Kafka and StreamSets, and talks about his experiences with Looker, the cloud-native BI tool that brings semantic modeling and modern development practices to the world of business intelligence.

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Independent Consultant Adrian Ward to talk about Oracle Business Analytics, Data Visualization, the BI Applications and his new book on Oracle Business Intelligence 12c.

Mark Rittman is joined by Gwen Shapira from Confluent to talk about Apache Kafka, streaming data integration and how it differs from batch-based, GUI-developed ETL development, the problem with architects, exactly-once processing and how data governance is coming to Kafka development with Confluent's new schema registry server.

Mark Rittman is joined by Maxime Beauchemin to talk about analytics and data integration at Airbnb, the Apache Airflow and Airbnb Superset open-source projects, and his recent Medium article on "The Rise of the Data Engineer"

Mark Rittman is joined by Timo Elliott, originally of Business Objects and now Innovation Evangelist for SAP, to talk about the origins of self-service BI with Business Objects' innovative "Universe" and the role analytics now plays within SAP; why analytics is the most important function within your organization and why the vast majority of analytics is still reporting (which isn't so bad); and the role AI and other innovations will play in analytics going in the future.

Mark Rittman is joined by Kevin Madden and Josh Feingold to talk about graph + spatial analytics, Tom Sawyer Software ... and why a tweet goes viral

Mark Rittman is joined by Daniel Mintz from Looker to talk about BI and analytics on Google BigQuery, data modelling on the new generation of cloud-based distributed-data warehousing platforms, and Looker's re-introduction of semantic models to big data analytics developers