Sad day as Todd Snider, the last of the great pot smoking barefoot hippie folk singers, has passed. I probably saw Snider at least a dozen times and my kids grew up with him in the background. We're all the poorer now.

North Carolina Apache Iceberg meetup is back next week with talks from Minio, CelerData, and Confluent. Come learn about the latest in open table formats and the open lake house. #databs

ADBC drivers in #Java? Yes. The latest release of ADBC adds a JNI layer that lets Java apps load drivers, run queries, and fetch results fast in @arrow.apache.org format. Read the new blog post from @ian.columnar.tech and David Li for examples and perf comparisons vs. JDBC. Link in comments👇

Happy release day, Drive-By Truckers dropped two and half hours of remix/remastered tracks along with a bunch of live performances. This is the only DBT I need in my life 😂

Today I learned that Rome has an entire store dedicated to @duckdb.org merchandising!

We were touring the Roman Forum today when we thought we heard a small explosion followed soon by a rush of sirens. We saw the fire crews and police later after leaving the Colosseum. Glad to learn there were no fatalities.

The 2025 MAD Landscape is out from Matt Turck. After ten years of explosive growth in the landscape, the team decided to narrow the products and companies represented by almost half. Now the most remarkable thing about the landscape is the curious choice over what's been included or excluded.

We love Apache Arrow, but when I learned about Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC) I wanted it available for every data platform like yesterday. So I'm super excited for the launch of Columnar! #databs

Looking forward to being at the GovAI Summit (Oct 27-29, Arlington VA) on behalf of Coginiti! If you’ll be around, stop by our booth and let’s connect in person. And if you’re not at the conference but you'd like to grab a coffee (or whiskey🥃) while I’m in town, send me a message and lets meet up.

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Ian Cook (@ian.columnar.tech) will present @columnar.tech's work on Apache Arrow's database connectivity API (ADBC). ADBC is available in modern DBMSs. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Excited for the return of soup season

I didn't expect my first post on substack to be about competitors, but then the dbt labs/fivetran merger got announced. So here's a point of view from someone who doesn't use either, but in the space. tl;dr the merger doesn't change anything for most of us

Who knew that the future surveillance state was going to be brought to you by Amazon Ring cams? (Not exactly shocking that this would be driven by corporations)

Apache Iceberg North Carolina Community Meetup is back November 19th!! Register here: luma.com/4vj17iue If you’d like to give a talk at this or a future event, drop us a proposal: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

One day the industry will recognize the drawbacks of AI agents and nondeterministic automation, and rediscover the UNIX philosophy of chaining together small purpose built tools in a low cost and predictable way, otherwise known as shell scripts.

We've open sourced QuackStore - a block-based caching extension for DuckDB! 🦆 QuackStore dramatically speeds up queries on remote data by intelligently caching only the blocks you need. Now available as a DuckDB community extension: github.com/coginiti-dev...

You can now call ML models in DuckDB using the Infera extension, which is just pretty damn cool. #databs github.com/CogitatorTec...

Coming to Raleigh for All Things Open? We've got something special cooked for the data community. #databs #AllThingsOpen

Fivetran in negotiations to purchase dbt labs, this after just acquiring SQLMesh. I’m sure they aren’t the only bidders, but should they win it’s hard to imagine they keep two data transformation frameworks in operation. Great for Coginiti to see competitors rolled up. #databs

Great turnout for our Low-Key data meetup in Raleigh last night. Wonderful catching up with so many regulars and meeting the new people that showed up! Lots of great conversations about people, processes, careers, and the personal highlight for me... meeting someone building ml for chicken sexing!

It’s really cool to see what’s getting built using the components of the composable data stack like Apache Datafusion, Apache Arrow, and Apache Iceberg. Cloudflare’s R2SQL is just another example of what’s possible. Hey @columnar.tech where is the driver for this?

OK!! #DataBS conf starts in 45min and I'm gonna be busy hosting, SO, things to know: Chat is on discord, NOT zoom: bit.ly/databs-chat Last min registration: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi... Official Schedule: databsconf.com/schedule/

Spent a few days offline communing with nature and contemplating another trip around the sun. Didn’t spend a minute thinking about data, sql, open table formats, snow vs dbrx, etc. Regular nonsense will commence tomorrow after I’ve deleted all these emails.

I made a magic quadrant about how to choose your tech stack Seriously, DYOR: no one will do it for you. Try out stuff. See what works. Ignore reports from people who don't do the work and are pay-to-play anyway

Next week is the start of @db.cs.cmu.edu's latest seminar series: Future Data Systems @samarchdb.bsky.social and I are hosting speakers from leading systems in the datalake / lakehouse space. Mondays @ 4:30pm ET via Zoom. Open to the public. Videos posted to YouTube: db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/fal...

O: Dad what is syntax? D: It's about how words are structured in a language. O: What's boolean? D: Hold on what are you working on...

If you believe everyone deserves quality health care they can afford, then you and I are on the same page.

Check out @russellspitzer.bsky.social dispelling Apache Iceberg myths. #databs

Never over estimate your users. Considering adding a connector for Yugabyte because some people don't know they can just use our Postgres connector.

SingleStore (MemSQL if you’re old) mostly acquired by PE firm Vector Capital. 2025 has been a hot year for data acquisitions #databs

We're excited to have Matthew Mullins (@mmullins.coginiti.co), CTO for COGINITI, presenting "Data Management with Apache Iceberg and Mixed Compute" at #AllThingsOpen! 2025.allthingsopen.org/sessions/dat...

I was profoundly saddened to hear that my friend Brian Cantwell Smith has passed away after a long illness. Brian's work on on the foundations of computing and intelligence was deep and insightful. He was a remarkable person & overall mensch. May his memory be a blessing. tinyurl.com/2u3fh42m

I'm going to have to drive over the mountains for this one! DataTune is coming back to Nashville after a very successful run last year that saw over 500 attendees. I love these regional data conferences that really connect local communities of data practitioners.

I think this is mostly a case of philosophers behaving poorly, but in this job market I kind of admire the grift. That anyone would spend any time wasting brain cells on model welfare is pretty embarrassing.

I've been helping our analytics team integrate our DataFusion-based query engine for Postgres into EDB Postgres Distributed and finally here's an end-to-end demo. You get HA Postgres plus seamless replication and DataFusion-based queries. This query turned out 6x faster than PG.

PopSQL is shuttering but users have great landing spot in Coginiti Team. All the collaboration features of PopSQL and then some.

The least surprising news of the week: Fivetran announcing its acquisition of Tobiko (SQLMesh) #databs

This is an important read

Fantastic turn out for our inaugural NC Apache Iceberg community meetup! Anchored by a trio of great talks from Danica Fine, Matt Topol, and Lester Martin. It's always great to get to hang out with super smart people in the open source data community! #databs

Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025

My daughter put the oven into self clean mode. Now the house smells amazingly like a pizzaria but I can't cook anything for another three hours.

Apache Iceberg community meetup is coming to Raleigh next week and we've got an exciting slate of speakers lined up for our first event! Danica Fine, Snowflake Open Source Advocate Matt Topol, Columnar Co-founder Lester Martin, Starburst Developer Advocate RSVP today, space is limited

Yes! @mmullins.coginiti.co will be joining the stellar speaker cast at @datadaytexas.bsky.social datadaytexas.com/2026/speaker...

pft this is just a taste of correction. Palantir could come down by 50% and still be overvalued

SAS isn’t a name you’d typically associate with open source, but besides sponsoring ATO they also employ the president of the Apache Software Foundation.

This week on Counting Stuff, the #dataBS conference attendee registration form is open! Also an intro to the 6 of 14 talks we have confirmed! Tickets are free/pay-what-you-want and there's technically a limit on attendees so grab yours today! www.counting-stuff.com/databs-conf-...

You’re excited about AI models, but I’m excited about this new artist series Grande fly reel from Redington. We’re not the same!

lolz Databricks must really hate public markets. What’s the record for number of private funding rounds?

One of the WFH benefits that would be hard to trade at this point in life, the 30-45 minutes of coffee and reading time I get in the morning. Can't imagine trading that for a commute in a vehicle. (Would consider trading for a train ride though)