In this podcast episode, host I interview Robert Zych, a software engineer at Raft with nearly 20 years of experience in software and data engineering. Robert talks about his engineering background and why he is so passionate about the Apache Pinot project. Robert explains that Apache Pinot is a game changer in real-time analytics, offering scalability, performance, and powerful features like UPSERT and the StarTree index. These capabilities, Robert states, are lacking in other data warehouses he has worked with, making Pinot a compelling choice.

Robert also highlights the importance of data quality when using Pinot for real-time analytics, emphasizing the need for accurate and complete data to build solid metrics. As an expert in the Pinot community, Robert shares the top three critical features he believes are essential for a real-time analytical use case. He also explains how Pinot makes Kafka queryable and emphasizes the importance of good-quality data for building solid metrics. Additionally, Robert discusses the ability to ingest data on the fly and add indexes to support query patterns, which is particularly useful for platform teams like the one he worked with at DoorDash.

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