
Drill to Detail
Mark Rittman is joined each episode by a special guest from the world of business intelligence, analytics and big data.
Latest episodes

Mar 20, 2019 • 38min
Drill to Detail Ep.61 'Kaggle, DataRobot and How to Be a ... Zillionaire!' With Special Guest Jordan Meyer
Mark Rittman is joined by DataRobot’s Jordan Meyer to discuss Kaggle, machine learning, deep neural networks and his team’s strategy to win the $1m ZIllow Prize, beating over 1000 other teams to come up with the most accurate home value prediction.Zillow Prize: Zillow's Home Value Prediction (Zestimate) | KaggleAnd the Zillow Prize Goes to…Team ChaNJestimate!Meet the ‘Zillow Prize’ winners who get $1M and bragging rights for beating the Zestimatehttps://github.com/jordanmeyerData Scientist Spotlight: Jordan MeyerDeep Learning definition on WikipediaABC - How To Be A Zillionaire (Wall Street Mix)

Mar 5, 2019 • 36min
Drill to Detail Ep.60 'A Deeper Look Into Looker' With Special Guest Lloyd Tabb
The Drill to Detail Podcast returns for a new series with our host, Mark Rittman, joined by Lloyd Tabb, Founder CTO and Chairman of Looker to talk about the foundational story of Looker and LookML, query latency and semantic models, analytic engines and code IDEs, analytics developer workflows and the rise of cloud elastically-scalable databases, packaged applications and embedded analytics and why learning (and loving) are the long-term keys to analytics and business success.Looker JOIN: The Tour 2019“7 Reasons Looker Built a New Language for Data”“How do you decide what to model in dbt vs LookML?” - Tristan Handy“Looker co-founder finds freedom and inspiration on his bike rides” - BizJournals.comLooker Packaged Applications“A simple explanation of Symmetric Aggregates or: Why On Earth Does My SQL Look Like That?” - Daniel MintzDrill to Detail Ep.48 'Mondrian OLAP, Apache Calcite and Database Dis-Aggregation' With Special Guest Julian Hyde

Oct 2, 2018 • 45min
Drill to Detail Ep.59 'Looker, dbt and Digital Analytics Today' With Special Guests Tristan Handy and Stewart Bryson
Mark Rittman is joined in this Looker JOIN 2018 Special by long-term friends of the show Tristan Handy from Fishtown Analytics, and Stewart Bryson from Red Pill Analytics to talk about dbt and enabling data engineering for data analysts; the state of modern data analytics consulting today, and what we’re looking forward to hearing about at next week’s Looker JOIN 2018 conference in San Francisco, CA.Looker JOIN 2018, San Franciscodbt (data build tool)“Future Proof your Analytics Stack”

Jul 3, 2018 • 46min
Drill to Detail Ep.58 'Candy Crush Saga, Analytics and Mobile Gaming' With Special Guest Jonathan Palmer
Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Jonathan Palmer from King Games to talk about the role of analytics in the development of Candy Crush Saga and other King games, their use of Looker along with Google BigQuery and Exasol to provide analytics capabilities to their game designers and product owners and his approach to doing all of this in a fast-moving, technology-driven internet business.- Candy Crush Saga article on Wikipedia- King Games company website- “How King Games is Crushing Games Data” DataIQ article- Looker and King Games case study- Jonathan Palmer on LinkedIn

Jun 18, 2018 • 36min
Drill to Detail Ep.57 'WhereScape Red and Data Warehouse Automation' With Special Guest Neil Barton
Mark Rittman is joined by Neil Barton, Chief Technology Officer at WhereScape to talk about metadata-driven data warehouse design, automating the build and management of data warehouse infrastructure and the thinking behind his company's WhereScape Red and WhereScape 3D tools.

Jun 4, 2018 • 1h 21min
Drill to Detail Ep.56 'Essbase Cloud, Analytics Cloud and Cloud Analytics Consulting' with Special Guest Matt Yorke
In this specially-extended episode just before ODTUG KScope'18, Mark Rittman is joined by Matt Yorke from Qubix to talk about Oracle Essbase Cloud, Oracle Analytics Cloud and the business of Oracle Cloud analytics consultingEssbase Cloud is Here!Oracle Analytics Partner Forum 2018Oracle Autonomous Analytics CloudODTUG KScope’18Matt Yorke on LinkedIn

May 21, 2018 • 49min
Drill to Detail Ep.55 'Snowplow, Data Pipelines and Event-Level Digital Analytics' with Special Guest Yali Sassoon
Mark Rittman is joined by Yali Sassoon from Snowplow to talk about data pipelines and Hadoop in the cloud; how web analytics evolved from counting pageviews to today's event-level analysis of consumer behavoir across all digital channels; why digital analytics is hard but interesting; and Snowplow's approach to building a successful hybrid open-source/commercial software business that competes successfully with megavendors such as Google and Adobe.Snowplow websiteSnowplow Insights commercial hosted service detailsSnowplow Open-SourceEvolving Your Pipeline - Yali Sassoon - Snowplow Berlin Meetup #3Snowplow on Looker

May 10, 2018 • 51min
Drill to Detail Ep.54 'DataRobot & Machine Learning Automation' with Special Guest Greg Michaelson
Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Greg Michaelson from DataRobot, talking about the benefits of automating the discovery and automation of analytics and machine learning in financial services and other industries.DataRobot: Automated Machine Learning for Predictive ModelingDataRobot for Business AnalystsAutomated Machine Learning Drives Intelligent Business (Jen Underwood, Information Week article)Marketing Attribution, Artificial Intelligence, and Game TheoryGreg Michaelson LinkedIn Profile

Apr 23, 2018 • 40min
Drill to Detail Ep.53 'ThoughtSpot, Search and AI-Powered BI' With Special Guest Doug Bordonaro
Mark Rittman is joined by ThoughtSpot's Chief Data Evangelist Doug Bordonaro to talk about the value of data, issues around trust and consent raised by the EU's new GDPR regulations, and how ThoughtSpot are applying ideas from search engines combined with artificial intelligence smarts to surface insights and drive real value for business users from their analytics investment.Value Becomes the 5th “V” in Big Data FactorsThoughtSpot - Search and AI-Driven Analytics for HumansThe ThoughtSpot BlogDoug Bordonaro on LinkedIn“Will GDPR Make Machine Learning Illegal?”

Apr 9, 2018 • 49min
Drill to Detail Ep.52 'Lyft, Ride-Share Analytics and ETL Developer Productivity ' With Special Guest Mark Grover
Mark Grover LinkedIn Profile and Github Profile"Hadoop Application Architectures" "Drill to Detail Ep. 7 'Apache Spark and Hadoop Application Architectures'Lyft Engineering Blog"Software Engineer to Product Manager" blog by Gwen Shapira"Introduction to the Oracle Data Integrator Topology" from the Oracle Data Integrator docs siteApache Airflow and Amazon Kinesis homepages "Experimentation in a Ridesharing Marketplace" by Nicholas Chamandy, Head of Data Science at Lyft"How Uber Eats Works with Restaurants""Deliveroo has built a bunch of tiny kitchens to feed more hungry Londoners" - Wired.co.uk