The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Collecting Data in the Physical World

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Prateek Joshi.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we give you a teaser of the show that we just recorded. Kostas, we talked with Prateek, who has a platform that collects data from all sorts of physical sensors. This was such a fun episode because there were just so many new things that I had no idea about. But what was the thing that stuck out to you most about what Prateek talked about in terms of working with data that's being emitted by objects in the physical world? really enjoying it. It's something that I'm missing a little bit because of the cloud is that we are talking about like a whole process where you kind of work with the data, but at the same time, you also get in touch like with actual physical, tangible things. Like you have to go there and like set up sensors. You have to make sure that the network works. You might have like problems with the network.

Like it's all these things that, okay, before the cloud, like engineers would get in contact like physically, let's say with the servers that the software, right. But outside of your laptop, like you don't really do that anymore. You might be like deploying software on thousands of servers and you probably have never seen these servers, right? So that's like one of the things that this conversation reminded me that I have started like missing a little bit and it can probably like explain some behavioral, like some, yeah, like consumer behaviors that I have, like buying some weird network equipment for my home

that makes zero sense. But it's nice, you know? Yeah, I agree. The other thing that was super interesting is like when you think about optimization of data flows in a cloud environment, right? And let's say specifically cost, because this came up on the

episode. You know, you think about maybe like a cheaper storage layer, you know, sort of the frequency with which you might run jobs, you know, there are a number of ways you can sort of optimize for cost. One thing that was fascinating was he was talking about, you know, you can buy individual sensors that connect directly to the internet, but they're way more expensive. And so you basically, you can buy cheaper sensors and you have a gateway box, like a physical box and a local network. And then the gateway, you know, communicates to the internet, which was super interesting. And so I'm with you. I loved hearing about the way that they're optimizing a data flow and how the very

first mile of that is highly physical, but there are so many opportunities. So if you're listening to this and that sounds at all interesting, you're going to love the episode because that's just a small taste. So subscribe if you haven't, and you'll get notified when the episode goes live, and we will catch you on the show.