Fun conversation with @jkxosound.com about where I think things are going in the AI agents space, Strands Agents, and rats 🐀

@clare.dev is one of the leaders making AI engineering simple and scalable at AWS. Had a great time chatting with her as we discussed Strands Agents and patterns like “Retrieval as a Tool”.

Really appreciate the depth at which the Hex team broke down their Text-to-SQL implementation. Everyone's trying to teach LLMs SQL like it's a training problem but it's really a graph traversal problem.

In my post about #DuckDB I digress into the role of the database buffer cache to discuss how we segregate transactional workloads from analytical. DuckDB turned out to be a natural, lightweight approach to offloading analytical queries ensuring our application upheld performance requirements.

Instead of materialized views, we built in-process DuckDB caching in the control plane of Striim Developer — improving query performance 5–10x with zero added infra. PostgreSQL for OLTP, DuckDB for Operational OLAP. But I won't call it HTAP 🤐 medium.com/striim/beyon...

@marcbrooker.bsky.social breaks down how they've architected a fully ACID-compliant database service that combines simple, serverless management with high availability and massive scale on AWS Aurora DSQL. youtube.com/shorts/dScUi...

This was actually my longest podcast ever at over 70 minutes. Not sure I could have made it any shorter because nerding out on databases with Andy Pavlo was too fun.

Was super fun chatting with @andypavlo.bsky.social to kick off the new season of What's New in Data. We dive into vector databases, text to sql, trends in data infrastructure, and Andy's awesome (and open) database course. youtube.com/shorts/tjLmx...

A side effect of LLMs: I'm taking on way more than I ever have in my life. I don't know if this is more productive or diluting myself. tbd!

Just found out one of the internal b2b CRUD app vendors is more like CRD because it doesn't support updating submissions. AI gonna cook that sector so hard.

and that’s why I’m working on a Saturday morning 🫠

Your adversaries are taking (not my) Presidents Day off. Time to ship. 🚀

I’ll never forget where I was the day I learned oats could be milked.

Them: Wait so you're saying I don't need to deploy Kafka? Me: No Them: Kinesis? Me: No Them: Zookeeper? YARN? Me: No Them: Will you write every record to disk and replicate it? Me: No Unfortunately the bar of complexity for streaming has been set so high. I'm calling it Streamholm Syndrome.

I'm not sure whether to be more amazed at the hate for FiveTran's price increase or the fact that Reddit doesn't know Striim exists and are proposing batch solutions to this persons obvious streaming CDC use case. www.reddit.com/r/dataengine...

They really gave the smell of rain an epic name: petrichor. They really did that.

A single Striim cluster (multi-node for scalability and fault tolernace) can handle 35k, very wide, very active databases that produce millions of DML per hour hour and dozens of DDL per day. The 'intelligence' layer or Striim was able to apply rule based logic on how to handle complex DDL.

I will die on this hill but MySQL's 'Alter Table Add Column AFTER' DDL is pointless. It doesn't change the layout on disk. If you care about order of the columns, that's purely a read side construct and you should address it in your query not your DDL!

We’ve shifted embedding generation and transformers left into the streaming layer to support near real-time RAG. Take a read if you want to hear the optimizations we made for change data capture and incremental embedding generation. www.striim.com/blog/real-ti...

Remind me: 1,000 days.

Driving from SF to LA talking to ChatGPT about Kafka. I think that’s how schizo starts.

I always love seeing clovers in the wild! Knowing every transaction is streamed to Snowflake in real time with Striim’s streaming CDC service. We do a lot of work to ensure transactions are bound reliably and replicated with no duplicates while maintaining low latency.

youtu.be/9YSU-M0m1Jk?... When I saw the fire up the hill, I knew we wouldn't have much time to get out before the only escape road would become gridlocked. I texted my friends up on Lachman Ln an hour before they got an alert from the city to leave.

It's 2025 why am I still explaining federation vs code conversion vs replication.

As someone taking inventory of receipts of everything I ever owned, I regret every single purchase I didn't make online because its so hard to find the receipt.

I should be charging for this type of life coaching on LinkedIn.

I was really surprised to hear a data team ask me how replication will impact their database and had legit concerns. Database providers need to do a better job making sure their developers have confidence deploying for HA.

MAGA narrative has infiltrated the Palisades fire. The truth is there was lots of low and mixed income apartments along Sunset in my area (Marquez) and near the high school. Those residents deserve to come back home too. Some had been there for decades.

This gives me hope I’ll find all that data conference swag I never wore 🤞🏼

Transaction logs and their respective interfaces are a bit of a complicated topic and SQLServer has some unique challenges. I'd say its quite different from Oracle's redo log and how OSS databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL approach logical replication. We worked on making the first in-memory log...

“The executives want a report on why so many customers churned last quarter but I told them they need to wait for me to build an interoperable data lake using an open table format like Netflix did (we’re a 50 person startup).”

Whoever leaked this story definitely wants Databricks to bid 2x on Redpanda 😂

After a year of record breaking growth for Striim, it was great to celebrate our wins and plan for the future. We defied gravity, solved problems that companies 1000x our size couldn't solve, won 20% of the Fortune 100 and 4 of the Fortune 10. Here's to a great 2025. Data Streaming 🚀

My neighbor Chuck always went all out making Halloween a spectacle on our block. Seeing him on the news was heartbreaking but equally inspiring. If he’s rebuilding, we know the neighborhood is coming back better than ever.

SQLServer’s approach to logging is great for recovery and homogenous replication but lacks mature layers of abstraction. Without a direct interface to logs, SQL Server relies on undocumented functions or CDC tables (which adds overhead). We've solved the latter with our SQL2Fabric solution.

An unspoken requirement of data engineering is looking at raw, ambiguous data and figuring out how to turn it into accurate business insights. Hiding in infrastructure development to isolate yourself from business meaning is counterproductive.

Relevant

2000s pop production was a cultural peak. For instance Janet Jackson’s “Someone to Call My Lover” is a prime example of super producers, sampling Satie’s Gymnopédie so subtly that the average pop listener doesn’t notice the classical influence. open.spotify.com/track/43zr9k...

We'll find out that the hidden, undisclosed costs of training DeepSeek were closer to $1b/year soon enough. Anyways, good opportunity for the laggards to buy NVIDIA shares.

I was reading Steinbeck's “Of Mice and Men” in a guest room offered to us by generous strangers. The foreword described families leaving the Dust Bowl, leaving clouds of dust behind, looking for a better life in California with only what they could carry. Hmmm...anyways where should we move to? 😂

Playing tennis and my opponent hits an amazing shot Me: wtf how did they do that? This will be a tough match. Them: wtf how did I do that? Going to need more luck to win this match.

Striim Developer gives you a free, serverless option to build real-time pipelines. It includes our Automated Pipelines (automated data movement with streaming ingest) for BigQuery, Snowflake, and Databricks, our Streaming SQL processor, and application connectors. striim.com/docs/en/stri...

Our local K-5 Marquez School was partially destroyed by the palisades fire. Hope to see it back better than ever one day!

I don’t understand car washes that are closed on sundays. Who has the time to get their car washed M-F 9-5?

Trump said WHAT now?!

yeah classic bay area. just as bad as the smoothie spot at my gym closing at 6 pm...despite the LA/NYC branches of the same business being open until 10 pm.

Resiliency and data correctness relies on granular checkpointing. In Striim, we handle this for you automatically and make it easily observable in the console.

In Striim Developer, you can set up fully automated, real-time streaming replication pipelines from your database to your other databases with transactional consistency, or your favorite data warehouse with streaming, near real time ingest. signup-developer.striim.com

Now that I stopped playing FIFA, EA's stock is cratering. www.cnbc.com/2025/01/22/e...

Cutting 3.5% of your workforce while simultaneously 'not slowing down hiring' is a helluva drug. Heart goes out to any of you impacted by this.