Marcel Kornacker, the creator of Apache Impala and co-creator of Apache Parquet, joins me to talk about his latest project: Pixeltable, a multimodal AI database that combines structured and unstructured data with rich, Python-native workflows.

From ingestion to vector search, transcription to snapshots, Pixeltable eliminates painful data plumbing for modern AI teams.

Follow Marcel

• Pixeltable: https://pixeltable.com
• Pixeltable GitHub: https://github.com/pixeltable/pixeltable
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelkornacker

Follow Aaron

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis
• Website: https://aaronfrancis.com – find articles, podcasts, courses, and more
• Database School: https://databaseschool.com

Chapters

• 0:00 – Introduction
• 0:20 – Meet Marcel Kornacker
• 1:19 – Early career and grad school in databases
• 2:12 – Joining Google and building F1
• 3:42 – How F1 used Spanner at Google
• 4:01 – Starting Apache Impala at Cloudera
• 6:02 – Why SQL still matters
• 7:29 – What keeps Marcel fascinated with databases
• 9:37 – The “SQL is dead” waves and shift to AI
• 10:21 – Observing pain points in computer vision pipelines
• 13:02 – Multimodal data challenges and the idea for Pixeltable
• 16:10 – How Pixeltable handles transformations with computed columns
• 26:29 – Example: processing video, audio, and transcripts in Pixeltable
• 33:12 – DAG execution and parallelism explained
• 37:00 – Transactional guarantees in Pixeltable
• 39:00 – Iterators and chunking data for search
• 42:26 – Using embeddings and semantic search
• 47:05 – Updating data and incremental recomputation
• 50:06 – Thoughts on RAG and hybrid search
• 53:14 – Real-world use cases and dataset curation
• 57:00 – Example: labeling food waste on cruise ships
• 1:02:00 – Labeling workflows and syncing annotations
• 1:02:41 – Pixeltable’s roadmap and cloud vision
• 1:07:10 – How to get involved with Pixeltable
• 1:09:03 – Closing and where to find Marcel