The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: The Power of Data Orchestration: A Game-Changer for Data Infrastructure, Featuring Nick Schrock of Dagster Labs

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Nick Schrock of Dagster Labs.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. What a guess. I feel like every time we asked Nick a hard question, he was able to come up with an answer that was concise and articulate for every single question. It was really amazing. I think you probably asked one of the winning questions, which was around the data orchestration landscape. And what a fascinating answer. He really, I mean, it was really helpful

to hear him talk about the entire spectrum where you have, you know, temporal, which you brought up on the show, which is sort of, you know, embedded in application code and sort of, you know, deeply integrated workflow, you know, sort of generic workflow execution all the way over to, you know, the DBT side of things, which is, you know, sort of ginger templating and, you know, managing jobs for running SQL queries. And he really painted that entire picture. It was so helpful to me. And that is my big takeaway. So I think this is a show for anyone who wants to understand deeply the history, the current state, and then think well about the future of orchestration.

This is a great show. Yeah. Oh, 100%. I think it's not just for the future of orchestrators. I think it's a glimpse to the future of data infrastructure in general. Yeah. And data engineering, I would say also,

because that's like another part of this episode that I think is super unique and super fascinating is that we talked a lot about what are the differences and also the overlaps between product engineering and data engineering, the tooling, the infrastructure out there, why we need to have these different disciplines or domains, what we can learn from one and transfer to the other, right?

And I think Nick has such an extensive experience at a kind of unique scale at Facebook, right? So his perspective, I think, is very interesting and very insightful and not that easy to find out there. So I would encourage everyone to tune in and actually listen to the conversation that we have. And hopefully we are going to have more conversations with him in the future too. Totally agree. One last bonus from this episode is that I think this is the episode where you became

a data influencer because, and I won't give away too much, Nick referenced that they're building their product marketing strategy off of a particular article that went on the first page of Hacker News that may or may not have been authored by one of the co-hosts of the show. So if that tantalizing piece of juicy information is interesting to you, listen to the entire show to hear more. Subscribe if you haven't, tell a friend, and we'll catch you on the next one.