The PRQL: Open Source and the Evolution of Data Systems with Andrew Lamb of InfluxData

Eric Dodds 00:05
Welcome to The Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show, you’ll get to meet our guests and hear about the topics we’re going to cover. If they’re interesting to you, you can catch the full length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to The Data Stack Show. We’re here with Andrew Lamb who is a staff engineer at Influx and Andrew, Kostas, and I have a million questions for you that we’re gonna have to squeeze into an hour, or you worked on the guts of some pretty amazing database systems. But before we dig in, just give us a brief background on yourself.

Andrew Lamb 00:43
Hello, yes, thank you. I’m Andrew. Obviously, I’ve worked on lots of low level database systems. I started my career at Oracle for a while. And I worked on an embedded compiler for a while and I was in the startup. And then I spent six years at a company called Vertica, which built one of the first sort of a phase a big distributed, shared nothing massively parallel evisas. I then worked in some various machine learning capacity startups, which was fun, but not really related to data stuff so much. And then for the last year, I’ve been working with Paul Dix and the co founder and CTO of Netflix data on the new storage engine for InfluxDB. Three Oh, so I’ve been down working on building a new sort of analytic engine for focused on

Kostas Pardalis 01:23
time series. And you’ve also been working a lot with data fusion, right, the open source projects, and they’re like, a lot of things we can chat about, as Eric mentioned, but something that I’m really interested to hear from, like your experience and perspective, Andrew, because you’ve been in this space for a very long time, is that it feels like we are almost like at the inflection point when it comes like today law systems and how they are built something that’s probably happening for a long time. But data systems are complex systems, and very important systems show is always like, let’s say risk is not exactly like something that people want to take when it comes back to that data, right. So like the evolution usually is like a little bit slower compared to other systems. But it seems like we are reaching that point right now where the way that we build these systems is going to like radically change. So I’d love to hear from you. How we go to these points, what are the let’s say, the milestones that are leading to that, and what the future is going to be looking like, based on like, what you’ve seen and what you’re seeing out there. So that’s the part that I’m really interesting to hear. What about you? What are like some things that you would like to talk about? Yeah,

Andrew Lamb 02:38
I would love to talk about that. And I’d love to talk about sort of the role open source software plays in that evolution and how we got there. That was something that influx, I think, always, as a company has understood and really valued is open source, and how that’s both evolving, and then also how you leverage open source to build the next generation products. I think it’ll fit beautifully. And I think we can illustrate the story of sort of what we’re doing and I posted you three do as part of that longer term trend. And I think there’s lots of interesting things to talk about there.

Kostas Pardalis 03:07
Sounds great. What do you think, Eric? Let’s go and do it.

Eric Dodds 03:10
Well, I’m ready. I’m ready. We need to hit the ground running here because we have so much to cover. Yeah, let’s do it. All right. That’s a wrap for the prequel. The full length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don’t miss it.