The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Governance, Flexibility, and the Future of Enterprise Data with Viktor Kessler of Vakamo

Episode Date: May 15, 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. Welcome back to the Data Stack Show. We are recording live in Oakland, California at the Data Council Conference. We are recording live in Oakland, California

at the Data Council Conference. It's been an awesome week so far, and we have a really fun guest, Victor Kessler. Victor, welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you. Thank you guys for inviting me. All right, well, we want to talk about all things, lake houses, and talk about Lakekeeper.

And, but first, tell us about your background. Absolutely. Well, first of all, I'm based out of Switzerland, so from Europe, and I'm happy to be here at Data Console. I am one of the co-found of a company named Vakamo, and Vakamo is the company which develops a Lakekeeper open source Appligeisberg catalog. And from a background, I'm ex-Drenu, ex-MongoDB.

Yes, in ex-Risk Manager. Yeah, I'm ex-Drenio, ex-MongoDB. Yes, in ex-risk management. Absolutely. You know, like I'm based previously out of Germany. In Germany, we have a lot of insurance companies. And one of the companies I used to work with was Munich Re-Ergo and different companies. So Victor, one of the topics that I think we need you to clear us up on is catalogs. And maybe a little bit of a misnomer. So we want to get some clarity from you on that and then what do you want to talk about?

Yeah, well well catalog from you know like what I he is a misused worked and unfortunately like everything is a catalog and if we're gonna talk about Catalogs around Lake house. There is a specific technical catalog what you need for Apache iceberg And what we would love to talk like from a Rackamo is all about the metadata and technical metadata, which need to become actionable. Yeah, love it. Awesome. Well, let's dig in.

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.