Summary

The first stage of every good pipeline is to perform data integration. With the increasing pace of change and the need for up to date analytics the need to integrate that data in near real time is growing. With the improvements and increased variety of options for streaming data engines and improved tools for change data capture it is possible for data teams to make that goal a reality. However, despite all of the tools and managed distributions of those streaming engines it is still a challenge to build a robust and reliable pipeline for streaming data integration, especially if you need to expose those capabilities to non-engineers. In this episode Ido Friedman, CTO of Equalum, explains how they have built a no-code platform to make integration of streaming data and change data capture feeds easier to manage. He discusses the challenges that are inherent in the current state of CDC technologies, how they have architected their system to integrate well with existing data platforms, and how to build an appropriate level of abstraction for such a complex problem domain. If you are struggling with streaming data integration and change data capture then this interview is definitely worth a listen.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Once you sign up and create an alert in Datafold for your company data, they will send you a cool water flask.
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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ido Friedman about Equalum, a no-code platform for streaming data integration

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you start by giving an overview of what you are building at Equalum and how it got started?
• There are a number of projects and platforms on the market that target data integration. Can you give some context of how Equalum fits in that market and the differentiating factors that engineers should consider?
• What components of the data ecosystem might Equalum replace, and which are you designed to integrate with?
• Can you walk through the workflow for someone who is using Equalum for a simple data integration use case?
  • What options are available for doing in-flight transformations of data or creating customized routing rules?
  • How do you handle versioning and staged rollouts of changes to pipelines?
• How is the Equalum platform implemented?
  • How has the design and architecture of Equalum evolved since it was first created?
  • What have you found to be the most complex or challenging aspects of building the platform?
• Change data capture is a growing area of interest, with a significant level of difficulty in implementing well. How do you handle support for the variety of different sources that customers are working with?
  • What are the edge cases that you typically run into when working with changes in databases?
• How do you approach the user experience of the platform given its focus as a low code/no code system?
  • What options exist for sophisticated users to create custom operations?
• How much of the underlying concerns do you surface to end users, and how much are you able to hide?
• What is the process for a customer to integrate Equalum into their existing infrastructure and data systems?
• What are some of the most interesting, unexpected, or innovative ways that you have seen Equalum used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while building and growing the Equalum platform?
• When is Equalum the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of Equalum?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
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Links

• Equalum
• Change Data Capture
  • Debezium Podcast Episode
• SQL Server
• DBA == Database Administrator
• Fivetran
  • Podcast Episode
• Singer
• Pentaho
• EMR
• Snowflake
  • Podcast Episode
• S3
• Kafka
• Spark
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• Logminer
• OBLP == Oracle Binary Log Parser
• Ansible
• Terraform
• Jupyter Notebooks
• Papermill

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA