E11: Streaming Data w/ Eric Sammer

03/17/23 • 24 min

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

👉 Data Council 2025 brings together the brightest minds in AI and data, featuring no-BS technical talks from industry leaders at Databricks, Perplexity, Replit, Datadog, DeepMind, and more. Join us for 3 DAYS of 100+ deep-dive talks, workshops, and our signature office hours where you can meet your AI & data heroes in person.

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Previous Episode

E10: Josh Benamram and Data Observability

Josh Benamram is the the co-founder & CEO of Databand, a data observability company acquired by IBM. We’ll discuss Josh’s segue from an early career in venture capital, into becoming a product manager for a business intelligence company (Sisense) and then becoming a founder himself, where he eventually exited his company to IBM.
Highlights:
[2:00] - How Josh's start in finance led to his career in startups
[6:25] - How working on cloud data warehouse connectors at Sisense, plus the growing need for data engineering led to the insight to start Databand
[9:30] - Josh's thoughts on the difference between data quality & data observability and how vendors in this market have exploded
[15:20] - The story to sell Databand to IBM - motivation and key issues in the decision, and how the mechanics of the relationship transpired
[19:45] - Josh's predictions on the data observability landscape for the future

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Next Episode

E12: From Vertica to Starburst - Data Processing for Analytics with Matt Fuller

Today on the podcast, I interview Matt Fuller, the co-founder of Starburst. Matt has worked in data for years ....
Highlights
[1:00] - How Matt got into data & the C-Store paper which led to him joining Vertica, an early columnar database prior to technologies like Hadoop, HDFS or Parquet
[3:45] - The increasing adoption of OSS data storage tools and the growth of the Hadoop ecosystem that ultimately led up to Presto/Trino
[6:00] - How Matt took the plunge as an engineer-founder to become a co-founder of Starburst and had to wear many different hats across customer support, GTM and product
[10:20] - Matt's experience as a bridge between customer problems and the engineering team, and how to tailor your discussions to the appropriate place in the org that the customer contact sits
[14:20] - How OSS changes the GTM dynamic of an enterprise product
[16:30] - What Matt is excited about regarding the future of Trino - the lakehouse architecture and open formats for data lakes (like Iceberg), and the Starburst SaaS product (Starburst Galaxy)