The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: What Comes to Mind When You Think of ‘Headless’?

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Artyom Keydunov & Pavel Tiunov of CubeJS.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. We just talked from the fascinating folks at Cube who are building Headless BI, which is absolutely fascinating. Costas, this may give away too much of what topic that you and I discussed in the intro of the show, but what comes to mind when you think of the term headless? Tim Boston.

Of course, it's Tim Burton. I'm actually proud of you for not thinking of technology right off the bat. That's a really good thing. I think that shows healthy balance in your mind. Yeah, I don't know. There's another thing that like comes to mind when I hear the term like hit list, hit list chicken. You know, the term like running around like they said it was. Yeah, that's makes me think of my kids. I mean, and that's not what we found out. I mean, that's not with Amazon. I tell them to work together with someone who knows the native speakers.

So what I like, all these things, like, so interesting. But I keep remembering them. I have to share them with everyone. Okay, so in terms of technology, what do you think of when you hear the term headless? It usually has to do with the visualizations. That's what we consider like the head, right? It's like it's, I give you a think about like, one of the first things that looks hit when

hit list was browsers. We had like two years, let's say, the browser without the render parts to do automation. It's something similar that's also happening with BI, right? Like when we say headless BI, okay, it's BI, but without the visualization part. So that's the most, I think, common thing over the years over the term. Yeah, yeah. Removal of the visualization. Yeah. I think about headless CMS.

But of course, I'm from a marketing background, right? So that sort of like solved a bunch of problems. But it's the same thing, right? Yeah, it's the same thing. Which actually was a really good, I think that was one of my favorite parts of this discussion was that we actually talked about headless and sort of broke it down right because

in some ways i think it's turned into a marketing term but it really is like when you sort of apply it especially to things like bi it is really interesting conceptually sort of like the the data flow and like the architecture of it itself is pretty interesting which i thought was a good part of the conversation. What stuck out to you? Because you got pretty deep into the technical weeds. There are a couple of different things. I mean, first of all, it's not something technical, but I think it was a very interesting part when we discussed with them about the journey, how they founded the company and like

what they were doing prior to. I think that's like a very interesting part and I think everyone should be interested in that. It's very interesting. I mean, from a technical perspective, like one of the things that's really resonating to me is about the casting customer that they mentioned at some point, which is very interesting when you consider serverless data warehouses or cloud data warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake and how they're

charged and how they operate. But anyway, that's something that we didn't manage. Like talking, like I'd love to talk more about that stuff. So hopefully when we have them back on the show, like we will have the opportunity to discuss about that. Because it has to do a lot with like how we add value to the operations around a data warehouse or a data lake. Absolutely. Well, it or a data lake. Absolutely. Well, it was a great episode. Unfortunately, we didn't dig deeply into Tim Burton,

but we hopefully got a laugh out of you in this prequel. And we'll get another one in the intro. And we thank you again, as always, for listening to the Data Stack Show. If you're interested in BI and new developments in headless BI, definitely check out this episode. Super interesting. And we'll catch you on the next one.