Adopting Real-Time Data At Organizations Of Every Size
Data Engineering Podcast
00:00
The Biggest Mindset Shift in the Cloud Data Warehouse Industry
As you go to real time, as you go to production, you have to involve a set of considerations that you may not have had to have before. With things like reverse ETL or pushing things back into production systems, folks have to sort of change the way they think. The biggest one of this is joining data from multiple data sources, right? This is something that has been extremely difficult using previous generation streaming tools. Once you can start to look at a join between your production OLTP data log from your segment web events, the list of possibilities expands.
Transcript
Play full episode
Transcript
Episode notes
Summary
The term "real-time data" brings with it a combination of excitement, uncertainty, and skepticism. The promise of insights that are always accurate and up to date is appealing to organizations, but the technical realities to make it possible have been complex and expensive. In this episode Arjun Narayan explains how the technical barriers to adopting real-time data in your analytics and applications have become surmountable by organizations of all sizes.
Announcements
- Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
- When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
- Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold.
- RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder
- Build Data Pipelines. Not DAGs. That’s the spirit behind Upsolver SQLake, a new self-service data pipeline platform that lets you build batch and streaming pipelines without falling into the black hole of DAG-based orchestration. All you do is write a query in SQL to declare your transformation, and SQLake will turn it into a continuous pipeline that scales to petabytes and delivers up to the minute fresh data. SQLake supports a broad set of transformations, including high-cardinality joins, aggregations, upserts and window operations. Output data can be streamed into a data lake for query engines like Presto, Trino or Spark SQL, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift., or any other destination you choose. Pricing for SQLake is simple. You pay $99 per terabyte ingested into your data lake using SQLake, and run unlimited transformation pipelines for free. That way data engineers and data users can process to their heart’s content without worrying about their cloud bill. For data engineering podcast listeners, we’re offering a 30 day trial with unlimited data, so go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver today and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell.
- Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Arjun Narayan about the benefits of real-time data for teams of all sizes
Interview
- Introduction
- How did you get involved in the area of data management?
- Can you describe what your conception of real-time data is and the benefits that it can provide?
- types of organizations/teams who are adopting real-time
- consumers of real-time data
- locations in data/application stacks where real-time needs to be integrated
- challenges (technical/infrastructure/talent) involved in adopting/supporting streaming/real-time
- lessons learned working with early customers that influenced design/implementation of Materialize to simplify adoption of real-time
- types of queries that are run on materialize vs. warehouse
- how real-time changes the way stakeholders think about the data
- sourcing real-time data
- What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen real-time data used?
- What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Materialize to support real-time data applications?
- When is real-time the wrong choice?
- What do you have planned for the future of Materialize and real-time data?
Contact Info
- @narayanarjun on Twitter
Parting Question
- From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Closing Announcements
- Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning.
- Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
- If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email hosts@dataengineeringpodcast.com) with your story.
- To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers
Links
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts
Save insights instantly, chat with episodes, and build lasting knowledge - all powered by AI.
Best podcast app
JD Stuart
App Store
I’ve been using Snipd for about a year and this app has been life changing. I listen to about 17 hours of podcasts a week and I want to take notes on 95% of them. Snipd makes it so easy to do. I can triple click my headphones and record a snip. The app also improves rapidly which is welcomed. It’s an easy subscription for me to pay.
The game changer for learning from podcasts!
Nelson
App Store
I used to use a different app that was able to save excerpts from podcast and really enjoyed it. I could listen to the podcast and quickly save things that I wanted to come back to later. Snipd take this to a whole new level with AI integration, creating summaries of podcasts and summarizing the main takeaways from what I’ve saved and snipped. I really love how it helps me prioritize what podcast to listen to with it summaries & deep dives.