The Analytics Engineering Podcast

The modern data stack is the third generation of data analysis products to come to prominence since the 90's. The prior waves—data warehouse appliances and then Hadoop—were both big steps forwards but ultimately failed to live up to their initial promise.

Is the modern data stack just another iteration in a long string of “trendy technologies” in data––waves that crash upon the shore but ultimately recede? Or is it somehow more permanent?

Register to catch the rest of Coalesce, the Analytics Engineering Conference, at https://coalesce.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is brought to you by dbt Labs.

Jordan Tigani is an expert in large-scale data processing, having spent a decade+ in the development and growth of BigQuery, and later SingleStore.

Today, Jordan and his team at MotherDuck are in the early days of working on commercial applications for the open source DuckDB OLAP database.

In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Jordan dives into the origin story of BigQuery, why he thinks we should do away with the concept of working in files, and how truly performant “data apps” will require bringing data to an end user’s machine (rather than requiring them to query a warehouse directly).

Ashley makes unique connections in her writing and work. On her Substack, "syntax error at or near ❤️," Ashley might be found comparing growing companies to butterflies, or going deep on how to accommodate sensitive people in the workplace.

In this conversation with Tristan & Julia, Ashley dives into the nuts and bolts of her trajectory pushing data innovation forward at Hubspot.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Most recently leading a data engineering team at Perpay, Sarah has built and managed data platforms end to end by working closely with internal engineering, product, and operational teams. She recently left her role to pursue a wide variety of endeavors, including writing on her Substack (https://sarahsnewsletter.substack.com/).

In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Sarah dives into how configuration-as-code can automate away data work, why you might want to consider adding a data lake to your architecture, and how those looking to build a self-serve data culture can look to self-serve frozen yogurt shops for inspiration.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

A debate has erupted on data Twitter and data Substack - should the modern data stack remain unbundled, or should it consolidate?

In this conversation, Benn Stancil (Mode), David Jayatillake (Avora) and our host Tristan Handy try to make some sense of this debate, and play with various future scenarios for the modern data stack.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.