It’s a special edition of The Data Stack Show as we come to you from the Data Council in Austin, Texas. Brooks and Matthew co-host the show to bring you some bonus episodes from some of the leading voices in the data space. This episode, Ryan Dolley, Vice President of Product Strategy at GoodData joins the show. During the conversation, Ryan shares his journey from creative arts to data, emphasizing the importance of understanding human behavior in both fields. The discussion also covers his diverse experiences in the data industry, the existential question of what to do with abundant data, the industry’s hype cycles, the challenges of self-serve data projects, the need for a balance between autonomy and governance in analytics, and more. 

This week on The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas chat with Ryan Blue, the Co-Founder and CEO of Tabular, and also creator of Iceberg and former Cloudera and Netflix employee. During the episode, Ryan discusses the challenges of managing large-scale data and the development of Iceberg, a new table format. He explains Iceberg’s benefits, such as automatic partitioning and improved metadata management, which simplify data engineers’ tasks and enhance query performance. The conversation covers the importance of atomicity in analytics systems, the scalability of Iceberg, and the trade-offs in mixed workload environments. Additionally, Ryan addresses the differences in cloud object storage performance and the integration of security and access controls into distributed file systems. He also touches on recent Iceberg updates, including Python and Rust support, the anticipation of view support in the upcoming release, and more. 

This week on The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas chat with Apurva Mehta, Co-Founder and CEO of Responsive, about event-driven applications and the necessary infrastructure. Apruva shares his journey from LinkedIn to Confluent and eventually founding Responsive, focusing on managing event-driven applications in the cloud. The discussion covers the definition of event-driven applications, the significance of latency and state in event processing, and the evolution of Kafka and Kafka Streams. They also explore the challenges of managing Kafka in production, the developer experience with Kafka Streams, and the operational complexities of running distributed stateful applications. Apruva highlights Responsive’s approach to simplifying the management of these applications, the potential for innovation in event-driven architectures, and more. 

This week on The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas chat with Chad Sanderson, the CEO at Gable.ai. During the episode, Chad discusses the complexities of managing the data supply chain, emphasizing the importance of data quality, feedback loops, and aligning incentives within organizations. He shares his journey from analyst to data infrastructure leader at companies like Oracle, Sephora, and Microsoft. Chad introduces his company, Gable, which tackles upstream data quality issues. He critiques traditional data catalogs and advocates for a more dynamic, decentralized approach. The conversation explores the role of metadata, the integration of data quality checks in the software development lifecycle, the need for cultural shifts towards data responsibility, the significance of full lineage graphs and semantic metadata, treating data as a product with quality gates, and more.