The Analytics Engineering Podcast

Juan Sequeda is a principal data scientist and head of the AI Lab at data.world, and is also the co-host of the fantastic data podcast Catalog and Cocktails.

This episode tackles semantics, semantic web, Juan's research in how raw text-to-SQL performs versus text-to-semantic layer, and where we both believe AI will make an impact in the world of structured data analytics.

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.

Benn Stancil, cofounder and CTO at Mode, returns to The Analytics Engineering Podcast to discuss the evolution of the term "modern data stack" and its value today. Tristan wrote on this idea for The Analytics Engineering Roundup in Is the Modern Data Stack Still a Useful Idea?

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.

Moritz Heimpel from Siemens and Ben Flusberg from Cox Automotive have very similar jobs. They both act as stewards of the data strategies at large, complex companies.

In this episode, we get into what it's like to collaborate with data at scale. Ben and Mortitz share their experiences adopting a data mesh architecture and what that looks like at their organizations.

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.

If Data Vault is a new term for you, it's a data modeling design pattern. We're joined by Brandon Taylor, a senior data architect at Guild, and Michael Olschimke, who is the CEO of Scalefree—the consulting firm whose co-founder Dan Lindstedt is credited as the designer of the data vault architecture.

In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Michael and Brandon explore the Data Vault approach among data warehouse design methodologies. They discuss Data Vault's adoption in Europe, its alignment with data mesh architecture, and the ongoing debate over Data Vault vs. Kimball methods.

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.

Jonathan Frankle is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML, which was recently bought by Databricks for $1.3 billion.

MosaicML helps customers train generative AI models on their data. Lots of companies are excited about gen AI, and the hope is that their company data and information will be what sets them apart from the competition.

In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Jonathan discusses a potential future where you can train specialized, purpose-built models, the future of MosaicML inside of Databricks, and the importance of responsible AI practices.

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.

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.