Daniel Beach (Data Engineering Central) joins Mehdi and Dumky for a tour through the open lakehouse renaissance, AI-native data agents, and the slow grind of getting humans out of the orchestration loop.
We cover the catalog commits feature in Delta + Unity Catalog + DuckDB (multi-writer lakehouse without Spark), Cloudflare's new unified data platform and their AI agent Skipper, ADBC quietly replacing JDBC/ODBC, Aaron Francis launching SoloTerm, Addy Osmani on the orchestration tax, Mitchell Hashimoto getting a 40x speedup with an agent in a loop.

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👋 Hosts
Mehdi Ouazza —  @mehdio 
Dumky de Wilde
Guest: Daniel Beach (Data Engineering Central) —  @dataengineeringdan 

Check out Daniel Beach's work on https://dataengineeringcentral.substack.com/

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00:00 Cold open · who's on today
01:43 Catalog commits · Delta + Unity Catalog + DuckDB
10:46 Cloudflare unified data platform · Skipper agent
17:53 Education in the age of AI · language as interface
24:39 ADBC · the next-gen database connection
30:17 SoloTerm · the terminal in the browser
38:56 The orchestration tax · Addy Osmani
40:38 Mitchell Hashimoto · an agent in a loop
45:50 Databricks Zerobus · streaming into the lakehouse
47:06 Outro

#DuckDB #DataEngineering #Lakehouse #DeltaLake #UnityCatalog #Cloudflare #AIagents #ApacheArrow #ADBC #MotherDuck