Product experimentation is full of potholes for companies of any size, given the number of pieces (tooling, culture, process, persistence) that need to come together to be successful. Vijaye Raji (currently Statsig, formerly Facebook + Microsoft) and Sean Taylor (currently Motif Analytics, formerly Facebook + Lyft) have navigated these failure modes, and are here to help you (hopefully) do the same. This convo with Tristan + Julia is light on tooling + heavy on process: how to watch out for...

The first LIVE IRL episode!   Stephen Bailey, data engineer at Whatnot and writer of an incredibly entertaining data substack, joins Tristan for a follow-up conversation to Stephen’s Coalesce talk, “Excel at nothing: how to be an effective generalist.” You can read Stephen’s writing at https://stkbailey.substack.com/. 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...

WARNING: This episode contains detailed discussion of data contracts. The modern data stack introduces challenges in terms of collaboration between data producers and consumers. How might we solve them to ultimately build trust in data quality? Chad Sanderson leads the data platform team at Convoy, a late-stage series-E freight technology startup. He manages everything from instrumentation and data ingestion to ETL, in addition to the metrics layer, experimentation software and ML.  ...

Abhi is a growth and data leader, and an excellent Twitter follow. Most recently, he was Head of Growth and Analytics at Flexport, where he helped the company to grow 10x over the past 3 years. Previously, Abhi led growth and data teams at Keap, Hustle, and Honeybook. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Abhi explains his methodology for setting up a new growth data organization, and how you might be falling victim to the dreaded "arbitrary uniqueness" bug. For full show notes and...

Katie was a founding member of Reddit's data science team and, currently, as Twitter’s Data Science Manager, she leads the company’s infrastructure data science and analytics organization. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Katie explores how, as a manager, to help data people (especially those new to the field!) do their best work. 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...

As Head of Analytics at Clearbit, Julie serves as a data team of one in a 200+ person company (wow!). In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Julie dives into how she's helped Clearbit implement data activation throughout the business, and realize the glorious dream of self-serve analytics. 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.

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...

Matt Bornstein and Jennifer Li (and their co-author Martin Casado) of a16z have compiled arguably the most nuanced diagram of the data ecosystem ever made.  They recently refreshed their classic 2020 post, "Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure" and in this conversation, Tristan attempts to pin down: what does all of this innovation in tooling mean for data people + the work we're capable of doing? When will the glorious future come to our laptops? For full show notes and to...

ClickHouse, the lightning-fast open source OLAP database, was initially released in 2016 as an open source project out of Yandex, the Russian search giant. In 2021, Aaron Katz helped form a group to spin it out of Yandex as an independent company, dedicated to the development + commercialization of the open source project. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Aaron gets into why he believes open source, independent software companies are the future. And of course, this conversation...

Justin Borgman is the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Starburst, and has almost a decade spent in senior executive roles building new businesses in the data warehousing and analytics space.  In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Justin dives into the nuts and bolts of Trino, the open source distributed query engine, and explores how teams are adopting a data mesh architecture without making a mess.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion...

Amit Prakash is Co-founder and CTO at ThoughtSpot. He has a deep background in search, having previously led the AdSense engineering team at Google and served on the early Bing team at Microsoft. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Amit gets real about the promise of AI in data: which applications are being widely used today, and which are still a few years out? For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to...

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...

As a PhD candidate at MIT, Kevin (and friends) published Sherlock, a data type detection engine (a surprisingly bedeviling problem) for data cleaning + data discovery. Now as co-founder and CEO of Metaplane, a data observability startup, Kevin applies these same automated data discovery methods to help data teams keep their data healthy. In this conversation with Tristan & Julia, Kevin wins the coveted award for “most crystal-clear explanations of complex technical concepts through...

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...

Will the dream of a mythical database to handle all workloads (transactional + analytical) ever become a reality, or does it violate the laws of physics? This question sparked a hearty debate internally at dbt Labs, and Jon "Natty" Natkins joins Julia here to continue the conversation. Natty knows databases, and this episode will take you on a historical romp through the rise and fall of Hadoop, the transition to cloud data warehouses, and what's waiting for us next in database-land. For...

Ashley is a Principal Analytics Engineer at Hubspot, and has helped lead their implementation of dbt. 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...

In this very special episode, we’ll be turning the spotlight on co-host Tristan Handy, the CEO & Co-founder of dbt Labs. In this AMA with Julia, you’ll get to know more about Tristan as a human, as a writer, and as the CEO of dbt Labs helping to push the analytics engineering practice forward.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. 

Your company has one definition for revenue across the organization, one definition of the customer, and one definition of sign-up. For people whose jobs are so defined by ensuring we’re aligned, we can’t seem to standardize on one definition for the Data Scientist. In this talk, Emilie Schario (Data Strategist-in-Residence at Amplify Partners and longtime dbt community member) proposes we lobby against the title Data Scientist, instead choosing some variation of the Core Four Data Roles:...

How is the data landscape evolving, what trends should you pay attention to and which should you ignore? In this panel, Julia Schottenstein (our fearless co-host and dbt Labs product manager) catches up with Sarah Catanzaro, Jennifer Li and Astasia Myers to dive into the trends playing out in our work. 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.

In this talk, former podcast guest Benn Stancil walks through what he believe the next evolution of the modern data stack should look like - and more importantly, how those who use it should experience it. 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.

Where does Snowflake go from here? What meta trends and technologies play into that vision? How does that impact the world of data analytics? Christian and Tristan have no shortage of opinions or ideas. This is your chance to hear some of them, live and unfiltered. 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.

Reynold Xin is a technical co-founder and Chief Architect at Databricks. He’s also a co-creator and the top contributor to the Apache Spark project. In this casual conversation with Drew Banin, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at dbt Labs, the two will be discussing the data infrastructure trends they find most interesting. Register to catch the rest of Coalesce, the Analytics Engineering Conference, at https://coalesce.getdbt.com.

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?

What is it like to build a data team for a company in the data space? This talk is centered around how dbt Labs is building their data team. We will cover how our team is structured, how we operate and interact with the greater organization, and how we set expectations and responsibilities that are helping us become a self-service organization. Register to catch the rest of Coalesce, the Analytics Engineering Conference, at https://coalesce.getdbt.com.

As a product leader at companies like Heroku and Zendesk, DeVaris specialized in building infrastructure-grade products. Currently, as the CEO of Meroxa, he enables teams to build real-time data infrastructure with the same ease as we now take for granted in batch. Tristan, Julia and DeVaris flow from his experience in tech mentorship, into the nuts and bolts of Change Data Capture (CDC), and how streaming data infrastructure can help data teams provide better end user experiences.