Uppsolver SQLake - Build Data Pipelines Not DAGs

Summary

Encryption and security are critical elements in data analytics and machine learning applications. We have well developed protocols and practices around data that is at rest and in motion, but security around data in use is still severely lacking. Recognizing this shortcoming and the capabilities that could be unlocked by a robust solution Rishabh Poddar helped to create Opaque Systems as an outgrowth of his PhD studies. In this episode he shares the work that he and his team have done to simplify integration of secure enclaves and trusted computing environments into analytical workflows and how you can start using it without re-engineering your existing systems.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• 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 Rishabh Poddar about his work at Opaque Systems to enable secure analysis and machine learning on encrypted data

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what you are building at Opaque Systems and the story behind it?
• What are the core problems related to security/privacy in data analytics and ML that organizations are struggling with?
  • What do you see as the balance of internal vs. cross-organization applications for the solutions you are creating?
• comparison with homomorphic encryption
• validation and ongoing testing of security/privacy guarantees
• performance impact of encryption overhead and how to mitigate it
• UX aspects of not being able to view the underlying data
• risks of information leakage from schema/meta information
• Can you describe how the Opaque Systems platform is implemented?
  • How have the design and scope of the product changed since you started working on it?
• Can you describe a typical workflow for a team or teams building an analytical process or ML project with your platform?
• What are some of the constraints in terms of data format/volume/variety that are introduced by working with it in the Opaque platform?
• How are you approaching the balance of maintaining the MC2 project against the product needs of the Opaque platform?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen the Opaque platform used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Opaque Systems/MC2?
• When is Opaque the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of the Opaque platform?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn
• Website
• @Podcastinator 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.
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Links

• Opaque Systems
• UC Berkeley RISE Lab
• TLS
• MC²
• Homomorphic Encryption
• Secure Multi-Party Computation
• Secure Enclaves
• Differential Privacy
• Data Obfuscation
• AES == Advanced Encryption Standard
• Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions)
• Intel TDX (Trust Domain Extensions)
• TPC-H Benchmark
• Spark
• Trino
• PyTorch
• Tensorflow

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Sponsored By:

• Upsolver:  Build Real-Time Pipelines. Not Endless DAGs! Creating real-time ETL pipelines is extremely time-consuming and engineering intensive. Why? Because when we attempt to shoehorn a 30-year old batch process into a real-time pipeline, we create an orchestration hell that makes every pipeline a data engineering project. Every pipeline is composed of transformation logic (the what) and orchestration (the how). If you run daily batches, orchestration is simple and there’s plenty of time to recover from failures. However, real-time pipelines with per-hour or per-minute batches make orchestration intricate and data engineers find themselves burdened with building Direct Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), in tools like Apache Airflow, with 10s to 100s of steps intended to address all success and failure modes, task dependencies and maintain temporary data copies. Ori Rafael, CEO and co-founder of Upsolver, will unpack this problem that bottlenecks real-time analytics delivery, and describe a new approach that completely eliminates the need for orchestration, so you can remove Airflow from your development critical path and deliver reliable production pipelines quickly. Go to [dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver](dataengineeringpodcast.com/upsolver) to start your 30 day trial with unlimited data, and see for yourself how to avoid DAG hell.
• Rudderstack:  RudderStack provides all your customer data pipelines in one platform. You can collect, transform, and route data across your entire stack with its event streaming, ETL, and reverse ETL pipelines. RudderStack’s warehouse-first approach means it does not store sensitive information, and it allows you to leverage your existing data warehouse/data lake infrastructure to build a single source of truth for every team. RudderStack also supports real-time use cases. You can Implement RudderStack SDKs once, then automatically send events to your warehouse and 150+ business tools, and you’ll never have to worry about API changes again. Visit [dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack](https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack) to sign up for free today, and snag a free T-Shirt just for being a Data Engineering Podcast listener.
• Datafold:  Datafold helps you deal with data quality in your pull request. It provides automated regression testing throughout your schema and pipelines so you can address quality issues before they affect production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database ahead of time. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI, so in a few minutes you can get from 0 to automated testing of your analytical code. Visit our site at [dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold](https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold) today to book a demo with Datafold.
• Linode:  Your data platform needs to be scalable, fault tolerant, and performant, which means that you need the same from your cloud provider. Linode has been powering production systems for over 17 years, and now they’ve launched a fully managed Kubernetes platform. With the combined power of the Kubernetes engine for flexible and scalable deployments, and features like dedicated CPU instances, GPU instances, and object storage you’ve got everything you need to build a bulletproof data pipeline. If you go to: [dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode](https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode) today you’ll even get a $100 credit to use on building your own cluster, or object storage, or reliable backups, or… And while you’re there don’t forget to thank them for being a long-time supporter of the Data Engineering Podcast!

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