Summary

A major concern that comes up when selecting a vendor or technology for storing and managing your data is vendor lock-in. What happens if the vendor fails? What if the technology can’t do what I need it to? Compilerworks set out to reduce the pain and complexity of migrating between platforms, and in the process added an advanced lineage tracking capability. In this episode Shevek, CTO of Compilerworks, takes us on an interesting journey through the many technical and social complexities that are involved in evolving your data platform and the system that they have built to make it a manageable task.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Shevek about Compilerworks and his work on writing compilers to automate data lineage tracking from your SQL code

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what Compilerworks is and the story behind it?
• What is a compiler?
  • How are you applying compilers to the challenges of data processing systems?
• What are some use cases that Compilerworks is uniquely well suited to?
• There are a number of other methods and systems available for tracking and/or computing data lineage. What are the benefits of the approach that you are taking with Compilerworks?
• Can you describe the design and implementation of the Compilerworks platform?
  • How has the system changed or evolved since you first began working on it?
• What programming languages and SQL dialects do you currently support?
  • Which have been the most challenging to work with?
  • How do you handle verification/validation of the algebraic representation of SQL code given the variability of implementations and the flexibility of the specification?
• Can you talk through the process of getting Compilerworks integrated into a customer’s infrastructure?
  • What is a typical workflow for someone using Compilerworks to manage their data lineage?
• How does Compilerworks simplify the process of migrating between data warehouses/processing platforms?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Compilerworks used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Compilerworks?
• When is Compilerworks the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of Compilerworks?

Contact Info

• @shevek on GitHub
• Webiste

Parting Question

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

Links

• Compilerworks
• Compiler
• ANSI SQL
• Spark SQL
• Google Flume Paper
• SAS
• Informatica
• Trie Data Structure
• Satisfiability Solver
• Lisp
• Scheme
• Snooker
• Qemu Java API

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