The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: A Data Council Austin Quintuple

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

Eric and Kostas preview an upcoming mini-series for next week featuring conversations with experts at Data Council Austin.

Welcome to the Data Sack Show prequel. We have a really special set of episodes coming up for you. Costas and I both went to Data Council Austin, one of the first big data-focused in-person conferences that has happened since the pandemic. I think there were 600 people there. And of course, we brought our microphones along because there were tons of people we wanted to talk to. So let me give you

the quick rundown. We are going to publish five episodes, five days in a row next week. So you're not going to want to miss it. They're a little bit shorter than our other episodes. So you can listen each day. And here's who we talked to. We talked to Firebolt, which was a fascinating conversation. We talked to Great Expectations, who's been on my list for a while because they're doing some really interesting things in terms of data quality.

We talked to the head of platform at PostHog. So interesting to hear about their architecture. We also talked with Pete Soderling, who founded the Data Council and just asked him about both his background and the Data Council, which was super interesting. And then this was a really fun one. We talked with someone from Carto, which does, actually, I said location data, but they said they corrected me and said that it's spatial data, which is super interesting. So you're definitely going

to want to check that one out. Kostas, what was your favorite part about recording all these episodes, rapid fire on site at Data Council? Meeting with all these people in person. I mean, I'm a little bit biased because it was the first like big event after like two and a half years of lockdown or how much we've been locked down. So it was very, very nice to be in the same space with so many people and being able like to interact. So that was like definitely like super nice.

And I think that when people listen to the episodes, they will get like a taste of the energy and like how happy were people to interact again and socialize and being able like to, you being able to talk in person. And of course, it's a great opportunity to be with all these different vendors in the same space and talk with all of them at the same time and see how they interact and how this industry is moving forward. So it was really good. It was really good. And I'm looking forward to more of these events, to be honest.

Totally. Here are a couple of things. Let's each looking forward to more of these events, to be honest. Totally. Here are a couple of things. Let's each do a couple of things that stuck out to us as themes across these guests. One was ClickHouse. We talked about ClickHouse a lot, actually. Multiple guests talked about ClickHouse, which is interesting. Firebolt talked about it. PostHog talked about it.

So that was super interesting to me. And then one other thing that was really interesting was the discussion around a sort of side project or internal project actually turning into a company. We talked with Great Expectations a lot about that, which was super interesting because that doesn't always work out well. But when it does, it can be huge, right? DBT is a great example of that. So those are two of the things that I really enjoyed. What were a couple of the themes that stuck out to you?

Yeah, actually, that's a very good point. Great Expectations has a very similar story to DBT in terms of how the product came into existence. So that was definitely something that I didn't know, to be honest. So it was very interesting to hear about that. But also another thing that was really interesting about great expectations is also the culture and how they see the whole concept of working with the community and how data is used and what it means to have also an ethical dimension

to how you build a business. So that was something that's not usually brought in conversations with startups, but that was like super interesting. I agree with you on ClickHouse. ClickHouse is technology that, I mean, it fuels many different companies out there from what it seems.

Although we also have like ClickHouse the company, hopefully one day we'll also be able to have someone from there like to discuss about their plans. I mean, outside of this, what I want to keep also is the conversation we had with Carto, mainly because we tend to think too much about structured data and tabular data and data that we have in a database system. And we forget that like the wealth of data that exists out there and how much more opportunity awaits out there to create value. And I think like Carto was like a very, very good example of that. And I'm pretty sure that like the next few years we'll see more use cases like this to become like more accessible to everyone.

And by the way, one other very interesting thing about Carto is like a European company that started like expanding in the United States and was also there like in the event. So that was like also very interesting. I agree. All right, here's your one teaser actually, and we'll give the teaser for Carto. One thing we talked about was how some companies

have used their tool to calculate the potential impact of a volcanic eruption on buildings that are certain distances. So definitely tune in for that because we talked about some really interesting use cases of data. All the episodes are great. We will catch you next week, five episodes, five days. Tune in.