The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: What Does It Mean to be a Developer Advocate?

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Alex Merced of Dremio.

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. Kostas, one thing that struck me was the emphasis on openness, which I guess makes sense for a tool like Tremio, you know, where they need to enable multiple technologies.

But a lot of times you'll hear technology companies be a lot more opinionated, you know, like this, we are doubling down on this file format because of these really strong convictions. And it was just really interesting to hear Alex say, you know, it probably works best with Parquet, but you should try to query a bunch of other stuff with it, and it'll work. It may not be the most ideal experience, but I appreciated that openness, right? And it seems like that's sort of a core value of the platform, at least as we heard from Alex. And so i thought that was really neat and honestly i think it's probably pretty wise of them even though they're you know obviously i think a lot of their customers are are well served by the parquet format but the fact that they seem to be building towards openness i think is probably

pretty wise for them as a company as well. Daniel Disneyenis Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I don't think that you can be in, let's say, the space of the lake house or the data lake without being open. I think that's like the whole point. That's how like a data lake started as a concept, like compared to a data warehouse where you have like the opposite. Like you have like an architecture that is like closed, you have like a central authority that like optimizes like every decision and have like total control over that. And okay, the data lake is the opposite of that.

It's like, okay, here are like all the tools, figure out how to put them together and optimize them for your own like use case, right? So obviously there are like pros and cons there. Yeah. I have to say though, that openness is a little, I think like easier in this industry, primarily because the things that you have to support are not that many. That's a great point. Primarily because the things that you have to support are not that many. Right? Like, okay, if you compare the number of frontend frameworks that we have

compared to file formats we have for like calling our data, you cannot compare them. Right? And there is a reason behind that. It's because it's a different type of problem and it has like a more limited, let's say, probable set of solutions. So that's something that's easier also like to achieve and maintain. Yeah. But this doesn't mean that it's not hard, right?

If you are going like to productize it, it's one thing, like what's just another thing like product. So yeah, it's, it's very interesting. I really want to keep what Alex said about the catalogs and the importance of cataloging, that this year is going to be an important year and hear a lot about that and yeah, like hopefully to have him again, like in a couple of months and see like how things are progressing and not just for Dremio, but for the whole industry in general.

Henry Suryawirawan, We will have him back on. Thank you again for joining the Data Stack Show. Subscribe if you haven't, tell a friend and we will catch you on the next one.