Eliminate Friction In Your Data Platform Through Unified Metadata Using OpenMetadata

Summary

A significant source of friction and wasted effort in building and integrating data management systems is the fragmentation of metadata across various tools. After experiencing the impacts of fragmented metadata and previous attempts at building a solution Suresh Srinivas and Sriharsha Chintalapani created the OpenMetadata project. In this episode they share the lessons that they have learned through their previous attempts and the positive impact that a unified metadata layer had during their time at Uber. They also explain how the OpenMetadat project is aiming to be a common standard for defining and storing metadata for every use case in data platforms and the ways that they are architecting the reference implementation to simplify its adoption. This is an ambitious and exciting project, so listen and try it out today.

Announcements

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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sriharsha Chintalapani and Suresh Srinivas about OpenMetadata, an open standard for metadata and a reference implementation for a central metadata store

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what the OpenMetadata project is and the story behind it?
  • What are the goals of the project?
• What are the common challenges faced by engineers and data practitioners in organizing the metadata for their systems?
• What are the capabilities that a centralized and holistic view of a platform’s metadata can enable?
• How would you characterize the current state and progress on the open source initiative around OpenMetadata?
• How does OpenMetadata compare to the OpenLineage project and other similar systems?
  • What opportunities do you see for collaborating with or learning from their efforts?
• What are the schema elements that you have identified as critical to a holistic view of an organization’s metadata?
• For an organization with an existing data platform, what is the role that OpenMetadata plays, and what are the points of integration across the different components?
• Can you describe the implementation of the OpenMetadata architecture?
  • What are the user experience and operational characteristics that you are trying to optimize for as you iterate on the project?
• What are the challenges that you face in balancing the generality and specificity of the core schemas for metadata objects?
• There are a large and growing number of businesses that create systems on top of an organizations metadata in the form of catalogs, observability, governance, data quality, etc. What do you see as the role of the OpenMetadata project across that ecosystem of products?
• How has your perspective on the domain of metadata management and the associated challenges changed or evolved as you have been working on this project?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on OpenMetadata?
• When is OpenMetadata the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of OpenMetadata?

Contact Info

• Suresh
  • LinkedIn
  • @suresh_m_s on Twitter
  • sureshms on GitHub
• Sriharsha
  • LinkedIn
  • harshach on GitHub
  • @d3fmacro 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 show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
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Links

• OpenMetadata
• Apache Storm
• Apache Kafka
• Hortonworks
• Apache Atlas
• OpenMetadata Sandbox
• OpenLineage
  • Podcast Episode
• Egeria
• JSON Schema
• Amundsen
  • Podcast Episode
• DataHub
  • Podcast Episode
• JanusGraph
• Titan Graph Database
• HBase
• Jetty
• DropWizard

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