Drill to Detail

We’re joined on this episode of Drill to Detail by fellow Brightonian Daniel Perry-Reed from Measurelab, talking with Mark about the new Google Analytics 4 release and its role within the future Marketing Technology stack.

From the wild west of data collection to conversion modelling

The sun is setting on Universal Analytics

MeasureFest April 2022: The role of GA in the future MarTech stack

Event-Based Analytics (and BigQuery Export) comes to Google Analytics 4; How Does It Work… and What’s the Catch?

The Measurepod

Mark Rittman is joined in this very special episode by Colin Zima, ex-Head of Analytics at Looker and now co-founder of Omni, a new analytics startup looking to become the fastest way to ask the first 100 questions.

Introducing Omni: The fastest way to turn SQL into intelligence

Omni Analytics Homepage

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Peter Fishman to talk about Mozart Data, the modern data stack and the need to automate the role of the analytics engineer.

MozartData website

Data Bites: A Virtual Lunch and Learn with Powered by Fivetran, Snowflake and Mozart Data

Launch HN: Mozart Data (YC S20) – One-stop shop for a modern data pipeline

Mark Rittman is joined by Eric Dodds to talk about Rudderstack's founding story and open-source roots, Segment compatibility and event-based pricing vs. MTUs and Rudderstack's "Warehouse-First" approach to building customer data platforms.

Rudderstack's Data Stack : Deep Dive

Introducing RudderStack Cloud: The Warehouse-First CDP for Developers

Rudderstack, Snowplow and Open-Source CDP Alternatives to Segment

How Twilio is Shaping Segment

Event-Based Analytics (and BigQuery Export) comes to Google Analytics 4; How Does It Work… and What’s the Catch?

Why (and How) Customer Data Warehouses are the New Customer Data Platform

Why Take a Warehouse-First Approach to Analytics

In this first episode of a new series, Mark Rittman is joined by Katie Hindson to talk about Lightdash, a new open-source alternative to Looker that uses dbt as its metrics layer and semantic model.

Lightdash.com

What is the dbt Metrics Layer?

Lightdash, Looker and dbt as the BI Tool Metrics Layer

We're joined on this episode of Drill to Detail by Dylan Baker and Josh Temple to talk about developing multi-layer modern data stack projects, Spectacles’ recently released integration with dbt and what's now possible with their new public API

Extending Spectacles with API-Triggered Runs

Synchronizing Looker and dbt™ with Spectacles

Drill to Detail Ep.82 'Looker Development, Automated Testing and Spectacles' with Special Guest Josh Temple

Adding Looker Regression Tests to the dbtCloud CI/CD Test Pipeline using Spectacles

Drill to Detail Ep.67 'Thinking Probabilistically and Scaling-Out the Modern BI Stack' with Special Guest Dylan Baker

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Nick Schrock, ex-Facebook Engineer and now Founder of Elementl to talk about GraphQL, data platform engineers and @dagsterio, a data orchestrator for machine learning, analytics, and ETL.

Introducing Dagster

Dagster homepage

Elementl homepage

Orchestrating dbt with Dagster

Moving past Airflow: Why Dagster is the next-generation data orchestrator

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Michale Drogalis, Product Manager at Confluent to talk about the history of Apache Kafka and real-time stream processing, the origins of kSQL and kSQLdb and the rationale and use-cases addressed by these products.

ksqldDB product homepage

Introducing ksqlDB Blog Post

Kafka Streams vs. ksqlDB Blog Post

Mark Rittman is joined by Eldad Farkash, Co-Founder and CEO at Firebolt to talk about SiSense and Panorama, the history of cloud data warehouses and how Firebolt's technology delivers query results 4-6000x faster than Snowflake, Redshift and AWS Athena.

Snowflake’s Co-Founder Marcin Żukowski Reflects On His Time At CWI

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica & MonetDB

Eldad Farkash, inventor of In-Chip technology, takes top honors with IT Software (Individual) award

Firebolt Touts Massive Speedup in Cloud Data Warehouse

Why Firebolt?

Maxime Beauchemin returns to the Drill to Detail Podcast and joins Mark Rittman to talk about what's new with Apache Airflow 2.0, the origin story for Apache Superset and now Preset.io, why the future of business intelligence is open source and news on Marquez, a reference implementation of the OpenLineage open source metadata service for the collection, aggregation, and visualization of a data ecosystem’s metadata sponsored by WeWork.

The Rise of the Data Engineer

Drill to Detail Ep.26 'Airflow, Superset & The Rise of the Data Engineer' with Special Guest Maxime Beauchemin

Apache Airflow 2.0 is here!

Apache Superset is a modern data exploration and visualization platform

The Future of Business Intelligence is Open Source

Powerful, easy to use data exploration and visualization platform, powered by Apache Superset™

Admunsen: Open source data discovery and metadata engine

OpenLineage

Marquez: Collect, aggregate, and visualize a data ecosystem's metadata

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Jeff Pollock, Vice President Product Development for Fast Data at Oracle, to talk about the history of Oracle Data Integration from Warehouse Builder and Sunopsis to the move to the cloud and today’s distributed “data mesh”, based around Oracle’s fast data product, Oracle GoldenGate.

Technology Brief : Dynamic Data Fabric and Trusted Data Mesh using the Oracle GoldenGate Platform

Data Mesh Part 1: Future of Data Integration with a Deep Dive into GoldenGate, Kafka and Spark

How to Move Beyond a Monolithic Data Lake to a Distributed Data Mesh

An Introduction to Real-Time Data Integration

Drill to Detail Ep.22 'SnapLogic's Enterprise Integration Cloud' With Special Guest Craig Stewart

Mark Rittman is joined by Tejas Manohar from Hightouch to talk about the concept of "reverse ETL", his journey from working on Segment's Personas product to co-founding Hightouch and his recent guest post on the Fivetran Blog, "Why Your Customer Data Platform Should Be the Data Warehouse".

Why Your Customer Data Platform Should Be the Data Warehouse

Hightouch Ushers In The Era Of Operational Analytics

Hightouch homepage

Customer 360 Data Warehousing and Sync to Hubspot using BigQuery, dbt, Looker and Hightouch

Why (and How) Customer Data Warehouses are the New Customer Data Platform

Drill to Detail Ep.76 'Segment, Ecosystems and Customer Data Platforms' with Special Guest Calvin French-Owen

The Drill to Detail Podcast returns for a new series with Mark joined by special guest Barr Moses to talk about data-driven customer success, data quality and the story behind her new data reliability startup Monte Carlo.

Monte Carlo - Data reliability delivered

dbt Data Source Freshness

Delivering End-to-End Data Observability with Looker and Monte Carlo

Data Observability: How to Build Your Own Anomaly Detectors Using SQL

Why Testing Your Data Is Insufficient

The Drill to Detail Podcast returns for an end-of-year and Coalesce 2020 special episode, with Mark Rittman joined by Tristan Handy from Fishtown Analytics along with Stewart Bryson from Red Pill Analytics.

Coalesce 2020

Drill to Detail Ep.78 ‘Coronavirus, Shutdowns and the Data Analytics Industry’ with Special Guest Seth Rosen

Snowflake Stock Has More Than Tripled Since Its IPO. CEO Frank Slootman Explains What’s Next.

Fishtown Analytics Announces $12.9M Fundraise

A License to build the future

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Davis Clark, Founder at Futuremodel, to talk about democratizing Looker development by automating and abstracting the process of LookML development.

Futuremodel Homepage

Futuremodel Early Access Beta Program

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Josh Temple, Analytics Engineer at Spotify to talk about analytics development, automated testing and Spectacles, an open-source tool and SaaS service that automatically tests your LookML to ensure Looker always runs smoothly for your users.

Spectacles product homepage and early access program

Data Tests in Looker

Automated testing in the modern data warehouse

#JOIN19 - Using Customized Open-Source Tools With LookML

Continuous Integration and Automated Build Testing with dbtCloud

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by GitLab.com Lead Developer Douwe Maan to discuss the history of the open-source Meltano project and its recent refocus on becoming the "glue" that creates open-source data pipelines, using plugin technologies such as Singer Taps and dbt transformations.

Meltano homepage and quickstart demo

Hey, data teams - We're working on a tool just for you

Revisiting the Meltano strategy: a return to our roots

Why we are building an open source platform for ELT pipelines

Singer - Simple, Composable, Open Source ETL

dbt Models - Everything is a select

Meltano Slack Community

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Hubspot's Director of Data Infrastructure James Densmore to talk about distributed and remote-friendly data teams, DevOps with dbt and Apache Airflow and career path options for data engineers.

How should I structure my data team? A look inside HubSpot, Away, M.M. LaFleur, and more (dbt Blog)

Software Engineers do not Need to Become Managers to Thrive (Data Liftoff Blog)

The Misunderstood Data Engineer (Data Liftoff Blog)

Modular ELT (Data Liftoff Blog)

Test SQL Pipelines against Production Clones using DBT and Snowflake (Dan Gooden)

HubSpot Data Actions, Harvest Analytical Workflows and Looker Data Platform (Rittman Analytics Blog)

Mark Rittman is joined by special guests Drew Banin, co-founder of Fishtown Analytics and maintainer of dbt (data build tool) and Stewart Bryson, long-time friend of the show and CEO/Co-founder of Red Pill Analytics to talk about scaling modern data stack projects from startups to the enterprise; how do you deal with data quality issues when there’s no central record of customers, how do we introduce data governance, enterprise requirements and meet the needs of enterprise architects and how do we scale concepts such as agile and analytics as engineering beyond our initial champion and data team?

The dbt Viewpoint

Fishtown Analytics and Drew Banin

Multi-Channel Marketing Attribution using Segment, Google BigQuery, dbt and Looker

Getting Started with dbt.

Red Pill Analytics

In this special episode of Drill to Detail Mark Rittman is joined by Seth Rosen, Co-Founder and Principal at Hashpath to talk about the impact of COVID-19 and the subsequent economic shutdown on the business of analytics and product startups, the work being done in the community to help find a cure and the role that data and analytics can have in accelerating the post-shutdown recovery.

“A COVID-19 Dashboard for Massachusetts using Looker and BigQuery” - Hashpath.com blog

“The Virus Survival Strategy for your Startup"

“COVID-19: Implications for business” - McKinsey

“As COVID-19 data sets become more accessible, novel coronavirus pandemic may be most visualized ever” - ZDNet.com

“Leave COVID-19 analysis to the experts” - Japan Times

We return with a new episode featuring Keboola CEO Pavel Dolezal on scaling analytics adoption beyond technical developers, the original story behind Keboola and how their team and friends won the recent Looker Join 2019 Hackathon event in San Francisco.

Keboola homepage

“DataOps is NOT Just DevOps for Data” - Data Kitchen Blog -

Looker Brings the Data Community Together at JOIN 2019

Mark Rittman is joined in the final Drill to Detail Podcast episode of the year by Calvin French-Owen, co-founder and CTO at Segment to talk about Segment's founding story, partner ecosystems and their new customer data platform service, Segment Personas.

analytics.js: The hassle-free way to integrate analytics into any web application (Github.com)

The Million Dollar Engineering Problem (Segment Blog)

Tracking Customer Email Marketing Interactions using Segment Personas and Connections (Rittman Analytics Blog)

Segment Personas product homepage

Mark Rittman is joined in this specially-extended episode of Drill to Detail by Olivier Dupuis, founder of Lantrn Analytics to share his experiences growing a product analytics business using today’s modern, modular SaaS analytics tools

Lantrns Analytics

Rittman Analytics

"How it Works" - Lantrns Analytics

"How Rittman Analytics does Analytics: Modern BI Stack Operational Analytics using Looker, Stitch, dbt and Google BigQuery" - Rittman Analytics Blog

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Bud Endress, Director, Product Management at Oracle to talk about the evolution of Oracle's query acceleration and in-database OLAP features from the acquisition Express Server back in the 90's to today's Autonomous Data Warehouse and Analytic Views.

Analytic Views, Oracle Database 12.2 … and Oracle’s Reboot of OLAP now Everything’s In-Memory (and SQL)

Oracle9i OLAP uncovered

Overview of Analytic Views

The Drill to Detail Podcast returns for a new season with Mark Rittman joined in this episode by Colin Zima, VP of Product and Chief Analytics Officer at Looker to talk about luck, thinking differently and the deliberate design choices behind Looker Data Platform.

JOIN 2018 - Colin Zima Product Keynote - Part 1

GrowthHackers.com AMA with Colin Zima, Chief Analytics Officer & VP of Product at Looker

HotelTonight - Story of a Modern Data-Driven Business

Drill to Detail Ep.60 'A Deeper Look Into Looker' With Special Guest Lloyd Tabb

In this final Drill to Detail Episode before we take a break for the summer, Mark Rittman is joined by Bhav Patel, founder of the London Conversion Rate, Optimization and Product Analytics Meetup to talk about Conversion Rate Optimization, Experimentation and A/B Testing, Customer vs. Product Analytics, Attribution and Personalization ... and the story behind the CRAP Meetups.

CRAP Talks: CRO, Analytics and Product London

CRAP Talks on Slack

Analytics, BigQuery, Looker and How I Became an Internet Meme for 48 Hours (CRAP Talks presentation)

McDonald’s is acquiring Dynamic Yield to create a more customized drive-thru (TechCrunch)

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode of Drill to Detail by returning guest Kent Graziano, Chief Technical Evangelist for Snowflake, to talk about Snowflake Data Warehouse's cloud-first architecture and recent product announcements at Snowflake Summit 2019.

Try Snowflake Data Warehouse for free

Watch Summit 2019 Keynotes

Snowflake Materialized Views: A Fast, Zero-Maintenance, Accurate Solution

Modern Data Sharing: The Opportunities Are Endless

Drill to Detail Ep. 5 'SnowflakeDB, and is Data Modeling Dead?' with Special Guest Kent Graziano

Mark Rittman is joined by Bruno Aziza, Group Vice President, AI, Data Analytics & Cloud at Oracle to talk about the recently-updated product roadmap for Oracle Analytics, Oracle BI in the marketplace, recent acquisitions in the analytics marketplace and the recent Oracle Analytics Summit at Skywalker Ranch, California.

Oracle Analytics Summit

Oracle Analytics Summit Recap

Oracle Analytics for Applications: Oracle Analytics Summit Product Tour

Oracle Analytics: Honing 18+ products down to a single brand

Mark Rittman, Founder and CEO of Rittman Analytics is joined in this special episode of Drill to Detail by returning guests Tristan Handy, Founder and CEO of Fishtown Analytics and Stewart Bryson, Founder and CEO of Red Pill Analytics to talk about the recent acquisitions of Looker by Google Cloud Platform and Tableau by Salesforce, the wider story about consolidation in the BI industry and whether the trend in analytics tools is towards enterprise features … or open source?

Five Thoughts on the Looker Acquisition by GCPCloud - Mark Rittman, Twitter Thread

A Wave of Acquisitions in Business Intelligence - Tristan Handy, Fishtown Analytics Blog

Google to acquire Looker - Thomas Kurian Blog Post

Google Cloud and Looker (PDF)

Siebel Analytics - The Jewel in the Project Fusion Crown? - Mark Rittman’s Oracle Weblog via Internet Archive

Applications in Looker

Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Tableau

Salesforce.com's Tableau Acquisition: Admitting Organic Innovation Failure?

In this special edition of the Drill to Detail Podcast hosted by Stewart Bryson, CEO and Co-Founder of Red Pill Analytics, he is joined by Robin Moffatt and Ricardo Ferreira, Developer Advocates at Confluent, to talk about Apache Kafka and Confluent, event-first thinking and streaming real-time analytics.

Confluent Download: https://www.confluent.io/download/

Demo: https://github.com/confluentinc/cp-demo/

Slack group: http://cnfl.io/slack

Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/confluent-platform

From Zero to Hero with Kafka Connect: http://rmoff.dev/ksldn19l-kafka-connect-slides

No More Silos: Integrating Databases and Apache Kafka: http://rmoff.dev/ksny19-no-more-silos

The Changing Face of ETL: Event-Driven Architectures for Data Engineers: http://rmoff.dev/changing-face-of-etl

Mark Rittman is joined by Dylan Baker, freelance analytics consultant, to talk about thinking probabalistically, analytics within venture-funded startups, devops and its role in scaling-out the modern BI stack.

dbanalytics.co

lookeraccess utility

Annie Duke – Wanna Bet? – [Invest Like the Best, EP.125]

London dbt Meetup #2

Mark Rittman is joined by Matthew Halliday to talk about the challenge of ETL and analytics on complex relational OLTP data models, previous attempts to solve these problems with products such as Oracle Essbase and Oracle E-Business Suite Extensions for Oracle Endeca and how those experiences, and others, led to his current role as co-founder and VP of Products at Incorta.

The Death of the Star Schema: 3 Key Innovations Driving the Rapid Demise

Accelerating Analytics with Direct Data Mapping

Accelerating Operational Reporting & Analytics for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS)

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Extract Transform Load (ETL)

E-Business Suite Extensions for Endeca: Technical Considerations

The Pain of Operational Reporting Solutions for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS)

Mark Rittman is joined by CEO and Founder of Supermetrics, Mikael Thuneberg, to tell the story of how a mention in the official Google Analytics Blog and a prize of a t-shirt led to him founding and bootstrapping a €2M ARR marketing analytics business that’s probably the most important software vendor the Drill to Detail audience has never heard of, and who recently moved into the data pipelines-as-a-service market in collaboration with Google Cloud Platform and the Google BigQuery team.

Announcing Supermetrics for BigQuery: Get a marketing data warehouse up and running in minutes (Supermetrics blog)

Supermetrics, Google BigQuery and Data Pipelines for Digital Marketers (Rittman Analytics blog)

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Jordan Tigani, Director of Product Management at Google for Google BigQuery, to talk about the history of BigQuery and its technology origins in Dremel; how BigQuery has evolved since its original release to handle a wide range of data warehouse workloads; and new features announced for BigQuery at Google Next’19 including BI Engine, Storage API, Connected Sheets and a range of new data connectors from Supermetrics and Fivetran.

Modern Data Warehousing with BigQuery (Cloud Next '19)

Modern data warehousing with BigQuery: a Q&A with Engineering Director Jordan Tigani

Introduction to BigQuery BI Engine

BigQuery Storage API Overview

Supermetrics and Fivetran BigQuery connectors

Drill to Detail Ep.2. 'Future of SQL on Hadoop', With Special Guest Dan McClary

Drill to Detail Ep.31 'Dremel, Druid and Data Modeling on Google BigQuery' With Special Guest Dan McClary

Mark Rittman is joined by returning Special Guest Jake Stein, former co-founder and CEO of Stitch and now SVP of Stitch at Talend to talk about the evolution of the data pipeline-as-a-service, data catalogs and data governance and the vision behind Talend’s acquisition of Stitch.

”The Vision behind Talend's acquisition of Stitch”

“Stitch is joining Talend”

“dbt: Analytics Engineering that Works”

Talend homepage

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Mike Ferguson, long-term analyst, consultant and Managing Director of Intelligent Business Strategies to talk about data warehouse modernization, analytics and big data project success within enterprise customers and the re-emergence of interest in data governance and master data management within the industry.

• Intelligent Business Strategies homepage

• Mike Ferguson’s Blog

• Drill to Detail Ep.46 'Market Trends and Findings from the BI Survey 17' With Special Guest Dr. Carsten Bange

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) | Kaggle

And the Zillow Prize Goes to…Team ChaNJestimate!

Meet the ‘Zillow Prize’ winners who get $1M and bragging rights for beating the Zestimate

https://github.com/jordanmeyer

Data Scientist Spotlight: Jordan Meyer

Deep Learning definition on Wikipedia

ABC - How To Be A Zillionaire (Wall Street Mix)

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.com

Looker Packaged Applications

“A simple explanation of Symmetric Aggregates or: Why On Earth Does My SQL Look Like That?” - Daniel Mintz

Drill to Detail Ep.48 'Mondrian OLAP, Apache Calcite and Database Dis-Aggregation' With Special Guest Julian Hyde

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 Francisco

dbt (data build tool)

“Future Proof your Analytics Stack”

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

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.

• WhereScape Red product page
• WhereScape 3D product page
• WhereScape Data Vault Express press release
• Worldwide Data Vault Consortium
• Neil Barton LinkedIn Profile

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 consulting

Essbase Cloud is Here!

Oracle Analytics Partner Forum 2018

Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud

ODTUG KScope’18

Matt Yorke on LinkedIn

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 website

Snowplow Insights commercial hosted service details

Snowplow Open-Source

Evolving Your Pipeline - Yali Sassoon - Snowplow Berlin Meetup #3

Snowplow on Looker

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 Modeling

DataRobot for Business Analysts

Automated Machine Learning Drives Intelligent Business (Jen Underwood, Information Week article)

Marketing Attribution, Artificial Intelligence, and Game Theory

Greg Michaelson LinkedIn Profile

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 Factors

ThoughtSpot - Search and AI-Driven Analytics for Humans

The ThoughtSpot Blog

Doug Bordonaro on LinkedIn

“Will GDPR Make Machine Learning Illegal?”

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 site

Apache 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

Mark Rittman is joined by Special Guest Fangjin Yang to talk about the history of Druid, a high-performance, column-oriented, distributed data store originally developed by the team at Metamarkets to provide fast ad-hoc access to large amounts of event-level marketing data, and his work at Imply to commercialise Druid and build a suite of supporting query and data management tools.

Druid project homepage

Druid - A Real-Time Analytical Data Store (pdf)

Druid - Learning about the Druid Architecture

Imply.io homepage

Druid, Imply and Looker 5 bring OLAP Analysis to BigQuery’s Data Warehouse

Mark Rittman is joined in this 50th Episode Special by our original guest on the first episode of Drill to Detail, Stewart Bryson, to talk about developing agile BI applications using FiveTran, SnowflakeDB and Looker and his recent work developing a BI solution for Google Play Marketing using Google Data Studio and Google Cloud Platform. We're also joined later in the show by Alex Gorbachev from Pythian, our mystery guest who Stewart then interviews flawlessly armed only with a set of questions given to him as the guest was unveiled ... though be sure to listen past the final closing music for the bonus out-takes.

#115 Google Play Marketing with Dom Elliott and Stewart Bryson

The Next-Generation Jump Program

The Data Sharehouse is Here

From Data Warehouse to Data Sharehouse

Alex Gorbachev profile on Pythian.com

Mark Rittman is joined by Will Davis from Trifacta to talk about the public beta of Google Cloud Dataprep, Trifacta's data wrangling platform and topics including metadata management, data quality and data management for big data and cloud data sources.

Google Cloud Dataprep on Google Cloud Platform

"Google Cloud Dataprep: Spreadsheet-Style Data Wrangling Powered by Google Cloud Dataflow"

"A New Cloud-Based Data Prep Solution from Google & Trifacta"

Trifacta website

"A Breakthrough Approach to Exploring and Preparing Data"

Trifacta platform architecture

"Garbage In, Garbage Out: Why Data Quality Matters"

"How to Put an Effective Metadata Strategy in Place"

- Oracle Designer page on Oracle.com

- Bitmap Index page on Wikipedia

- Mondrian project page on Github

- Mondrian OLAP Server page on Wikipedia

- MultiDimensional eXpressions (MDX) page on Wikipedia

- Julian Hyde blog

- Apache Calcite project homepage

- Apache Calcite Introduction and Overview deck

- Streaming SQL presentation at Apex Big Data World 2017, Mountain View, California

Mark is joined by long-term industry veteran and friend Christian Berg to talk about surviving fifteen years as a contractor in analytics industry, changes he's seen in the market and in how project are approached, the value in getting involved in the community, and in a specially extended Christmas and New Year edition we look back at what was topical in 2017 and what are Christian's predictions for 2018 ... and appoint Christian as Head of our Best Practices Found on the Internet.

• The 100 facets of Oracle Business Intelligence
• 50 shades of #Fail - Oracle BI worst practices in real life

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode of Drill to Detail by Dr. Carsten Bange from BARC to talk about findings from the recently completed BI Survey 17 including the continuing move to modern BI platforms and self-service desktop tools, analytics adoption trends and the increasing incorporation of BI functionality within business applications, the surprising topicality of master data management and data governance ... and whatever happened to Nigel Pendse and his legendary OLAP Report?

• The BI Survey 17: The World’s Largest Annual Survey of BI Users
• Master Data and Data Quality Management Now the #1 Trend in BI
• BI Trend Monitor 2018 Infographic: The Evolution of Trends
• The Business Intelligence Industry Continues Its Ongoing Empowerment of Business Users
• The OLAP Report: The origins of today’s OLAP products (c. 2005, from the Internet Archive)

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by returning special guest Jen Underwood to talk about what's new and innovative in the BI and analytics industry right now, and how AI and machine learning are this year's data discovery and data visualization.

• "Between The Lines At Tableau Conference" - Jen Underwood.com blog
• "Transform The Business With Automated Embedded Artificial Intelligence" - JenUnderwood.com blog
• "Moving From Bi To Machine Learning With Automation" -  JenUnderwood.com blog 
• "How Smart Data Discovery Will Radically Transform Analytics" - Tellius Webinar with Jen Underwood
• YellowFin BI - homepage
• Paxata - homepage
• "Drill To Detail Ep.8 'Self-Service BI, Data Prep & Big Data Vendor Strategy' With Special Guest Jen Underwood"

Mark is joined in this episode of Drill to Detail by Wes McKinney, to talk about the origins of the Python Pandas open-source package for data analysis and his subsequent work as a contributor to the Kudu (incubating) and Parquet projects within the Apache Software Foundation and Arrow, an in-memory data structure specification for use by engineers building data systems and the de-facto standard for columnar in-memory processing and interchange.

• Python Data Analysis Library
• "Ibis on Impala: Python at Scale for Data Science"
• Drill To Detail Ep.3 'Apache Kudu And Cloudera's Analytic Platform' With Special Guest Mike Percy
• Apache Arrow homepage
• "Apache Arrow and the "10 Things I Hate About pandas"
• "Apache Arrow vs. Parquet and ORC: Do we really need a third Apache project for columnar data representation?"
• "Some comments to Daniel Abadi's blog about Apache Arrow"
• Wes McKinney homepage

Mark is joined by Mike Durran from the Oracle Analytics Product Management team in this UKOUG Tech’17 special to talk about his route into product management via the Oracle Discoverer BI tool, Oracle’s latest product in this space Oracle Data Visualization Desktop 4 and its new features, and Mike’s upcoming sessions at the UK Oracle User Group’s Tech’17 event next week in Birmingham, UK.

• Oracle Data Visualization Desktop - Get Started
• UKOUG Tech'17 Conference Site

Mark is joined in this episode by Avi Zloof from Evaluex to talk about the new world of elastically-provisioned cloud-hosted analytic databases such as Google BigQuery and Amazon Athena, how their pricing model and vendor strategy differs from the traditional database vendors, and how machine learning can be used to automate performance tuning and optimize workloads in this new world of large-scale distributed query and storage. 

• SuperQuery - Free visualization tool for Google BigQuery
• SuperQuery Chrome Plugin
• Drill to Detail Ep.12 'Gluent and the New World of Hybrid Data' with Special Guest Tanel Poder
• BQQuery Mate Chrome Plugin

Mark is joined in this episode by Google Cloud Platform Developer Advocate Felipe Hoffa, talking about getting started as a developer using Google BigQuery along with Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Dataprep and Google Cloud Platform's machine learning APIs.

• Reddit BigQuery Forum
• Felipe Hoffa on Stack Overflow
• Felipe Hoffa on Medium
• Google Cloud Dataprep
• "How to aggregate data for BigQuery using Apache Airflow"
• Google Cloud Platform Github Repo

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Taylor Brown from Fivetran to talk about middleware for SaaS data, their focus on integrations with SaaS vendors and how this differentiates their offering, his thoughts on packaged analytic applications announced at the recent Looker Join conference ... and where the name "Fivetran" came from.

• Fivetran website
• Fivetran Source and Target Integrations
• Looker 5 Release with new Analytic and Data Blocks
• "Comparison of Two Great ETL Tools: Fivetran vs. Stitch Data"

In this episode Mark is joined by ex-colleague and now Technical Advisor to Gluent, Michael Rainey, to talk about hybrid platforms and Gluent's new cloud offload capability, the Hadoop market in-general and his thoughts on data engineering and the recently-released AWS Glue data integration service.

• Gluent Cloud Sync – Sharing Data to Enable Analytics in the Cloud
• Gluent Case Studies
• Gluent Data Platform Overview
• Amazon Glue
• The Rise of the Data Engineer and The Downfall of the Data Engineer by Maxime Beauchemin
• Drill to Detail Ep.26 'Airflow, Superset & The Rise of the Data Engineer' with Special Guest Maxime Beauchemin
• Drill to Detail Ep.12 'Gluent and the New World of Hybrid Data' with Special Guest Tanel Poder

Drill to Detail returns for a new season with special guest Jean-Pierre Dijcks, to talk about Oracle's Big Data Strategy now and in the past, thoughts on distributed query and storage in the cloud, and previewing themes and announcements to look forward to at the upcoming Oracle Open World 2017 event running in San Francisco next month

Mark Rittman is joined in this Summer Special episode by none other than Cameron Lackpour, Essbase expert and Oracle ACE Director, to talk about why and how Essbase won the OLAP wars, how Essbase Server works and the role it now plays in Oracle Analytics Cloud and his involvement with user groups over the years. In this specially extended edition he also gives us his reading recommendations for while you're at the pool or, as he will be, out camping, and he also shares his predictions for what we'll hear from Oracle and the analytics industry when he, and Drill to Detail, returns in the autumn after a well-deserved summer break. 

Mark Rittman is joined by Industry Analyst Mark Madsen to talk about marketing analytics and the rise of the omni-channel consumer, the use of AI in analytics and personalization and what this all means for brands, for advertisers and for marketers.

• Third Nature, Inc.

• "A Pragmatic Approach to Analyzing Customers"

• "Salesforce Einstein Keynote: AI For Everyone"

• "What is SAP Leonardo? Everything you need to know about SAP’s Leonardo platform"

In this episode Mark is joined by Jake Stein to talk about Stitch Data and their ETL tool for data engineers, the new open-source project Singer and his experiences building a software startup that both partners and competes with the big cloud platform vendors.

• Stitch Data
• Singer: Simple, Composable Open-Source ETL
• Setting the Data Strategy for Your Growing Organization
• The State of Data Engineering
• The State of Data Science
• Why our ETL Tool Doesn't Do Transformations
• Airflow: a workflow management platform
• Goodbye RJMetrics, Hello Fishtown Analytics
• Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL: A Guide to Building a High Functioning Data Science Department

Mark Rittman is joined by Donald Farmer to talk about his work at Microsoft on SQL Server Analysis Services and Integration Services, why he moved to Qlik and the challenges of evolving a BI product strategy from focusing on desktops to focusing on the enterprise, and some advice for customers, software vendors and partners working with data and analytics tools.

In this episode Mark is joined by Tristan Handy from Fishtown Analytics to talk about building-out analytics functions in high-growth startups, and three related blog posts he wrote on this topic.

• Fishtown Analytics
• dbt (data build tool) and Fishtown Analytics Github repos
• “The Startup Founder’s Guide to Analytics”
• “What are the steps / tools in setting up a modern, SaaS-based BI infrastructure?”
• “Building a Mature Analytics Workflow: The Analyst Collective Viewpoint”

Mark is joined by Qubit colleague Will Browne to talk about a recent academic paper co-authored with Mike Swarbrick Jones on conversion optimisation techniques in the eCommerce industry. Using analytics and statistical analysis On 20 billion "user journeys" recorded in Qubit's Google Cloud Platform-hosted Customer Data Store this paper compares techniques using data and machine learning to those based on traditional sales techniques to see whether data trumps emotion ... or both have their place.

• Analysis of 2 billion user stories explains how to compete with Amazon

• The meta-analysis of 6,700 ecommerce experiments

• The Journey to Personalization at Scale

Mark is joined by returning special guest Dan McClary to talk about data modeling and database design on distributed query engines such as Google BigQuery, the underlying Dremel technology and columnar storage format that enables this cloud distributed data warehouse-as-a-service platform to scale to petabyte-size tables spanning tens of thousands of servers, and techniques to optimize BigQuery table joins using nested fields, table partitioning and denormalization.

• Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets
• BigQuery under the hood
• Inside Capacitor, BigQuery’s next-generation columnar storage format
• Drill To Detail Ep.2. 'Future Of SQL On Hadoop', With Special Guest Dan McClary
• Google BigQuery, Large Table Joins and How Nested, Repeated Values and the Capacitor Storage Format (and Looker) Saves the Day

Oracle's Jack Berkowitz joins Mark Rittman to talk about a new category of continuously adapting, self-learning applications being built-out by Oracle that use machine learning together with enterprise and third-party data to create a new generation of intelligent HR, CX, SCM and ERP SaaS apps.

• "Adaptive Intelligence: What You Need to Know"
• Oracle's Adaptive Intelligence Apps product homepage

Stewart Bryson returns to the show to join Mark Rittman to discuss new-world BI and data warehousing development using Google BigQuery and Amazon Athena, Apache Kafka and StreamSets, and talks about his experiences with Looker, the cloud-native BI tool that brings semantic modeling and modern development practices to the world of business intelligence.

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Independent Consultant Adrian Ward to talk about Oracle Business Analytics, Data Visualization, the BI Applications and his new book on Oracle Business Intelligence 12c.

Mark Rittman is joined by Gwen Shapira from Confluent to talk about Apache Kafka, streaming data integration and how it differs from batch-based, GUI-developed ETL development, the problem with architects, exactly-once processing and how data governance is coming to Kafka development with Confluent's new schema registry server.

Mark Rittman is joined by Maxime Beauchemin to talk about analytics and data integration at Airbnb, the Apache Airflow and Superset open-source projects he helped launch and now works with day-to-day at Airbnb , and his recent Medium article on "The Rise of the Data Engineer".

• "The Rise of the Data Engineer" blog by Maxime Beauchemin
• Apache Airflow
• Airbnb Superset
• "Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL: A Guide to Building a High Functioning Data Science Department" blog by Jeff Magnusson

Mark Rittman is joined by Timo Elliott, originally of Business Objects and now Innovation Evangelist for SAP, to talk about the origins of self-service BI with Business Objects' innovative "Universe" and the role analytics now plays within SAP; why analytics is the most important function within your organization and why the vast majority of analytics is still reporting (which isn't so bad); and the role AI and other innovations will play in analytics going in the future.

• Timo's Elliott Business Analytics and Digital Business Blog
• "Analytics Is The Most Important Business Process in Your Organization!"
• "The Vast Majority of Analytics is Still Reporting (And That’s Not So Bad)"
• "What is the Story of Business Objects" (Quora answer)

Mark Rittman is joined by Kevin Madden and Josh Feingold to talk about graph + spatial analytics, Tom Sawyer Software ... and why a tweet about a certain WiFi kettle incident went viral last October.

• Visualizing When a Tweet Goes Viral
• How a Tweet Went Viral - BIWA Summit 2017
• English man spends 11 hours trying to make cup of tea with Wi-Fi kettle (The Guardian)
• The iKettle, the Eleven-Hour Struggle to Make a Cup of Tea, and Why It Was All About Data, Analytics and Connecting Things Together
• Tom Sawyer Software Perspectives

Mark Rittman is joined by Daniel Mintz from Looker to talk about BI and analytics on Google BigQuery, data modelling on the new generation of cloud-based distributed-data warehousing platforms, and Looker's re-introduction of semantic models to big data analytics developers.

Mark Rittman is joined by Craig Stewart to talk about application and data integration, ODI and Sunopsis, SnapLogic's approach to hybrid on-premise/cloud integration and the rise of data preparation and dataflow-based cloud integration tools.

Mark Rittman is joined by Independent Consultant Chris Webb to talk about MDX & DAX, MSAS and SQL SQL Server and the fall ... and rise, of Microsoft BI

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by MapR's Tugdall Grall to talk about MapR's platform differentation and relationship with open-source Hadoop, scaling and streaming, microservices, and MapR's platform strategy around big data workloads in the cloud.

Mark Rittman is joined by Elastic's Mark Walkom to talk about Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash and the Elastic Stack; business models built-around an open-source software core; and their move into cloud services with Elastic Cloud

Mark Rittman is joined by Vasu Murthy, Oracle's Senior Director for Product Management of Oracle Business Analytics to talk about what's new with OBIEE and Oracle Data Visualization and the recently released Oracle Analytics Cloud, a dive into the technical architecture of these new additions to Oracle's BI platform, and Oracle's vision for hybrid on-prem/cloud analytics.