The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: What Does the Modern Data Stack Mean to Normal Companies?

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Pedram Navid of West Marin Data.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we give you a preview of the show we just recorded. We just talked with Pedram Navid, who has done lots of interesting things in data. If you're listening to the show, there's a good chance that you've run across one of his articles on Substack discussing any number of topics. He's written some really helpful, really thought-provoking pieces, and it was really a pleasure to have him on the show. Costas, I'm going to preview the show by asking you a question.

In terms of the modern data stack, which is a subject that came up, what percentage of companies out there, let's just say maybe in the US to limit the sample size, even know what the modern data stack is or are familiar with the term modern data stack? I think most of the commoners don't even know what a data stack is. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's okay. Like it's a marketing term that started like from Silicon Valley and okay. Like for the people who live here, it feels like it's the whole world or whatever, but

it's a small bubble. And when I say bubble, I don't mean the bubble that way. Like it's just like our own little world here, you know, like we still have... How to figure out how to break out of this and make everyone like aware of all the different technologies and why this architecture is like different and why it is important or why it's like better than whatever we had in the past and like all these things. So it's a work in progress.

And people like brilliant marketeers like you have a lot of work to do to make sure that like we educate the whole planet on the need of the modern data stack. David Pérez- Well, I think to steer the conversation away from my egregious sense of confusing the world with marketing terminology, Pedram had the point when we talked about this that going from working at a really popular early-stage data startup to being a consultant helping companies try to work on what we call a data stack,

one of his main takeaways was that we're so far ahead of our, ahead of, you know, he said, you know, his clients even, right? Like so much more advanced than the rest of the world in terms of, you know, where we're at in thinking about the data stack and even the complexity of the tooling itself, that it really is a bubbler and echo chamber, which is really challenging. We did talk with him about how to break out of that, which was super interesting. And then we also talked a lot about modern tooling.

And you had a great conversation with him about DuckDB, which I found really interesting. And definitely, if anyone listening is interested in DuckDB, tune in because Costas and Pedram's conversation about why people love DuckDB was really interesting. Because it's really exploded. And then, of course, we talked about data stacks at early stage startups, which we hadn't really discussed on the show. So tons and tons of good information and good topics. You're not going to want to miss this one. So definitely tune in and we will catch you on the next one.