In this episode, I interview Eric Sammer, the founder & CEO of Decodable. Eric was previously an engineering manager at Cloudera, and before that the founder of Rocana, an early observability company that was sold to Splunk. Eric has an amazing perspective on the architecture of data systems based on his years of experience in the field. We chat about his thoughts on the opportunities and challenges specifically around streaming data.

Highlights:
[1:45] - Eric's start in ad-tech, which led him into the high-volume data world plus his experiences at Cloudera working on Avro, Parquet & Impala - an alternative to Hive & Presto
[4:45] - Eric's opportunistic path to starting a company as an engineer
[7:15] - Lessons learned while building his first company, Rocana, which was sold to Splunk in 2017, plus insights on the right way to find product-market fit
[10:50] - Eric's thoughts on why the time for streaming is now and how the use cases have surpassed fraud, waste and abuse + his tech stack of choice (Debezium, Kafka & Flink)
[14:55] - How streaming fits in the operational data landscape (OLTP)
[17:10] - Eric's thoughts on the value in streaming analytics (OLAP) and how ML models might get bigger benefits from streaming than dashboards do
[22:20] - Preview of the Streaming Data track @ Data Council Austin '23 where Eric is the track host

Thank you to everyone who made Data Council 2025 Oakland an incredibly experience! This year's talk videos will be uploaded to YouTube by end of May 2025.

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E11: Streaming Data w/ Eric Sammer