The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Data Council Debrief

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guests and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Before we dig into today's episode, we want to give a huge thanks to our presenting sponsor, Rudder Stack. They give us the equipment and time to do this show

week in, week out, and provide you the valuable content. Rudder Stack provides customer data infrastructure and is used by the world's most innovative companies to collect, transform, and deliver their event data wherever it's needed, all in real time. You can learn more at rudderstack.com. All right, this is the first episode of the Data Stack show ever recorded, I guess live isn't really the right word, but ever recorded from a moving Waymo. We are being driven by robots here in San Francisco, riding around with no driver.

We just got finished at data council this week in Oakland, recorded six episodes. A lot of takeaways from the conference this year. I think one thing that is abundantly clear to me is we are still figuring out how AI is changing everything, but it is changing everything. John, what are you thinking? Yeah, Brooks, I think great conference and I was just sharing that one of my favorite parts about the conference was doing the show at the conference. Like we got to sit down with so many great people all in the same space in real life, which is rare for us. Very special.

Yeah, really special. And got to go really deep with people on technology, on startup life, you know, a lot of different things. But as far as high level themes, I think one of the slides that came up was a description, like trying to explain the like evolution of the data stack. Yeah. And it talked like, you know, we were here and it like kind of described the like, I don't know, legacy era, whatever you want to call it, historical era where it was like Oracle and SQL server and you know, and that was like a data warehouse.

Yeah. That era like evolved all the way to current to kind of where we are now past the modern data stack, the data bricks, you know, redshifts part of that snowflake era, etc. And the interesting part is they had a big question, they had a break around 2024 and then a question mark on the screen. And like this is like going to the like premiere like conferences like we're here to like fill in that question mark. And then the words behind it were like, they didn't just leave it at a question mark.

It was essentially like iceberg question mark. Like we think we feel pretty confident iceberg is part of this. And the rest of it's a little bit still TBD. So it was a unique year to go. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, one thing I've been kind of thinking about too is Don't a ton of talk about the modern data stack, but one of the panels in particular

I think you know the modern data sack was part of one of the titles or something it we all joked about this in 2021 22 I can't remember when the whole like data stack was just like, the hype was kind of fever pitch. And some people started saying, well, you know, one day it's going to be the postmodern data stack. And I think that was kind of some of my thoughts this week is like, I mean, now is that now, which we refer to that as like the traditional data stack?

I don't know. Yeah, that's a great question. But clearly it is changing. You can't see us but Brooks and I are both like checking both directions as the Waymo makes a turn. There's cars parked on the street and it's like the visibility is like a little turkey. Yeah, wish us luck. There we go. All right, that's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.