In this conversation with Tristan recorded at Coalesce 2023, Kasey Mazza, an analytics engineering manager on the RevOps team at HubSpot, discusses the roles of data analysts and analytics engineers, the importance of building internal data communities, and the evolving landscape of data teams. 

Watch Kasey’s Coalescse 2023 presentation The career growth software development lifecycle.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. 

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

It turns out data plays a big role in getting cereal manufactured and delivered so you can enjoy your Cheerios reliably for breakfast. We talk with Arjun Narayan, CEO of Materialize, a company building an operational warehouse, and Nathan Bean, a data leader at General Mills responsible for all of the company's manufacturing analytics and insights. 

We discuss Materialize’s founding story, how streaming technology has matured, and how exactly companies are leveraging their warehouse to operationalize their business—in this case, at one of the largest consumer product companies in the United States. 

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. 

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Yannick Misteli is the head of engineering for the go-to-market domain at Roche, a $250 billion multinational pharmaceutical and diagnostics company. 

Roche was an early supporter of dbt Cloud, and Yannick helped move his team of 120+ engineers to a modern data stack. He always finds a way to push the boundaries to make a large company founded in 1896 incredibly modern and innovative. We wanted to know more about the "how" of the work—the people, process, and technology. 

Read more about Roche's data journey here: https://docs.getdbt.com/blog/dbt-squared

Andy Pavlo is a professor of databaseology (he says it's a made-up word) at Carnegie Mellon and currently on leave to build his own company—OtterTune, which uses AI to figure out the settings to get the best performance out of databases. He is one of the preeminent minds on databases and a die-hard relational database maximalist. We talk about the state of databases today, why there are so many specialized databases (and if we need so many), why tuning databases is so hard but important, and how the database landscape will evolve.

Jerry Liu is the CEO and co-founder of LlamaIndex. LlamaIndex is an open-source framework that helps people prep their data for use with large language models in a process called retrieval augmented generation. LLMs are great decision engines, but in order for them to be useful for organizations, they need additional knowledge and context, and Jerry discusses how companies are bringing their data to tailor LLMs for their needs.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. 

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Ian Macomber, head of analytics engineering and data science at Ramp and formerly the VP of analytics and data engineering at Drizly, and Ryan Delgado, a staff software engineer at Ramp, have played pivotal roles in establishing Ramp's data team from the ground up and are spearheading the development of their comprehensive roadmap.

In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Ian and Ryan share insights on how Ramp's data team transformed unstructured data from contracts into valuable insights to enable faster decision-making. The $8 billion company values speed and empowers teams to build, ship, and measure products quickly. Ian and Ryan also talked about their approach to adopting new tech and elevating data as an equal player alongside product engineering and design.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. 

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Daniel Le is the CFO at dbt Labs where he has built multiple teams. He is also the former head of FP&A and operations at Zoom, and he helped scale FP&A as the former finance director at Okta. 

In this conversation with Julia, Daniel shares his view as CFO on the challenges SaaS companies face and the importance of finance teams creating a holistic view of their business. Daniel gives advice to data leaders about how they can automate business processes with dbt Cloud and use self-service analytics to automate revenue recognition, generate consistent headcount analytics, and more to impact their organization. Read more about Daniel’s story here.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. 

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Bob Muglia likely needs no introduction. The former CEO of Snowflake led the company during its early, transformational years after a long career at Microsoft and Juniper. 

Bob recently released the book The Datapreneurs about the arc of innovation in the data industry, starting with the first relational databases all the way to the present craze of LLMs and beyond.

In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Bob shares insights into the future of data engineering and its potential business impact while offering a glimpse into his professional journey. 

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. 

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Advances in ML have transformed data privacy from a regulatory necessity into an opportunity to improve the work of data people.

Synthetic data for modeling + testing is one example of a hard thing that's now easy - and in this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Ian + Abhishek cover many other ways that privacy can actually be a skill that propels your work forward, rather than a mere legal best practice.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. 

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Julia just got back from Data Council in Austin, a conference organized by Pete Sonderling, where lots of startups share what they're building, data practitioners go to learn in hands-on workshops, and of course investors go to spot the next big trend.

In this episode, Taylor Murphy (Head of Product & Data at Meltano) + Pedram Navid (Founder, West Marin Data) join Julia to recap the conference and have a bit of fun. They talked streaming, how the MDS is growing up, new SQL variants, and, of course, AI.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.