Drill to Detail Ep.40 'Fivetran's Middleware for SaaS Data' With Special Guest Taylor Brown

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"

Drill to Detail Ep.35 'Stitch Data, Singer and ETL for Data Engineers' With Special Guest Jake Stein

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

Drill to Detail Ep.33 'Building Out Analytics Functions in Startups' With Special Guest Tristan Handy

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”

Drill to Detail Ep.29 'New-World BI Development using BigQuery, Looker, Kakfa and Streamsets' With Special Guest Stewart Bryson

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.

Drill to Detail Ep.27 'Apache Kafka, Streaming Data Integration and Schema Registry' with Special Guest Gwen Shapira

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.