The Analytics Engineering Podcast

Jordan Tigani helped build BigQuery, then left to bet that most data isn't big. Three years on, agents are proving him right. The MotherDuck CEO joins Tristan Handy on why local-first databases fit the agent era, and what an "agent swarm for data management" looks like.

For full show notes and to read the podcast's companion news...

Tristan sits down with Anders Swanson, a developer experience advocate at dbt Labs, to talk about the state of the Apache Iceberg ecosystem. They unpack the "open standards" shift, define the core building blocks (query engines, object stores, catalogs), and dig into why external catalogs have become a fourth namespace tier across platforms. Anders outlines a pragmatic, phased adoption model for Iceberg integrations, explains why m...

Tristan talks with Russell Spitzer, a PMC member of Apache Iceberg and principal engineer at Snowflake, about the evolution of open table formats and the catalog layer. They dig into identity and access at the catalog layer and why consensus‑driven standards make interoperability possible.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics...

Tristan talks with Lauren Anderson, Senior Director for Okta's Enterprise Data Platform. Lauren shares how identity sits at the center of two seismic shifts in data—AI agents and the open data lake—and why central governance and a shared semantic layer are critical. Lauren lays out how analytics engineers and data engineers should divide responsibilities as agents begin to write a growing share of analytical queries.

Fo...

Snowflake VP of Product Management Chris Child joins Tristan Handy to unpack Snowflake's AI roadmap and what it means for data teams. They discuss the evolution from Snowpark to Cortex and Snowflake Intelligence, how to govern agents with row- and column-level controls, and why Snowflake is investing in Apache Iceberg and the Open Semantic Interchange initiative (dbt Labs recently open sourced MetricsFlo...

In this episode, Tristan Handy sits down with Chang She — a co-creator of Pandas and now CEO of LanceDB — to explore the convergence of analytics and AI engineering.

The team at LanceDB is rebuilding the data lake from the ground up with AI as a first principle, starting with a new AI-native file format called Lance. Tristan traces Chang's journey as one of the original contributors to the pandas library to building a n...

Tristan talks with Mikkel Dengsøe, co-founder at SYNQ, to break down what agentic coding looks like in analytics engineering. Mikkel walks through a hands-on project using Cursor, the dbt MCP server, Omni's AI assistant, and Snowflake. They cover where agents shine (staging, unit tests, lineage-aware checks), where they're risky (BI chat for non-experts), and how observability is shifting from dashboards to root-cause explanations.

Tristan digs deep into the world of Apache Iceberg. There's a lot happening beneath the surface: multiple catalog interfaces, evolving REST specs, and competing implementations across open source, proprietary, and academic contexts. Christian Thiel, co-founder of Lakekeeper, one of the most widely used Iceberg catalogs, joins to walk through the state of the Iceberg ecosystem.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues...

What does it mean to be agentic? Is there a spectrum of agency? 

In this episode of The Analytics Engineering Podcast, Tristan Handy talks to Sean Falconer, senior director of AI strategy at Confluent, about AI agents. They discuss what truly makes software "agentic," where agents are successfully being deployed, and how to conceptualize and build agents within enterprise infrastructure. 

Sean shares practical ideas about...

In this season of the Analytics Engineering podcast, Tristan is deep into the world of developer tools and databases. If you're following us here, you've almost definitely used Amazon S3 it and its Blob Storage siblings. They form the foundation for nearly all data work in the cloud.

In many ways, it was the innovations that happened inside of S3 that have unlocked all of the progress in cloud data over the last decade. In this epi...

In this season of the Analytics Engineering podcast, Tristan is digging deep into the world of developer tools and databases. There are few more widely used developer tools than Docker. From its launch back in 2013, Docker has completely changed how developers ship applications. 

In this episode, Tristan talks to Solomon Hykes, the founder and creator of Docker. They trace Docker's rise from startup obscurity to becoming found...

In this decades-spanning episode, Tristan Handy sits down with Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Partners and former CEO of Syncsort (now Precisely), to trace the history of the data ecosystem—from its mainframe origins to its AI-infused future.

Lonne reflects on the evolution of ETL, the unexpected staying power of legacy tech, and why AI may finally erode the switching costs that have long protected incumbents.

For ...

In this episode, Tristan talks to Zach Lloyd, founder of Warp—a terminal built for the modern era, including for AI agents. They explore the history of terminals, differences between terminals and shells, and what the future might look like. In a world driven by generative AI, the terminal could once again be the control center of computer usage.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's compani...

In this episode, Tristan Handy and Lukas Schulte, co-founder of SDF Labs and now part of dbt Labs, dive deep into the world of compilers—what they are, how they work, and what they mean for the data ecosystem. SDF, recently acquired by dbt Labs, builds a world-class SQL compiler aimed at abstracting away the complexity of warehouse-specific SQL.

Join Tristan and members of the SDF team at the dbt Launch showcase to learn more...

In the first episode of our new season on developer experience, the cofounder and CTO of SDF Labs, now a part of dbt Labs, discusses databases, compilers, and dev tools. Wolfram spent close to two decades in Microsoft Research and several years at Meta building their data platform.

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Enginee...

Daniel Avancini is the chief data officer and co-founder of Indicium—a fast-growing data consultancy started in Brazil. 

There are a lot of data consultancies around the world, and a lot of them do great work. What has been so fascinating about Indicium's journey is their HR model. Rather than primarily hiring experienced professionals, they decided to go hard on training. They built a talent pipeline with courses and an...

A look inside at the data work happening at a company making some of the most advanced technologies in the industry. Rahul Jain, data engineering manager at Snowflake, joins Tristan to discuss Iceberg, streaming, and all things Snowflake. 

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Hamilton Ulmer is working at the intersection of UI, Exploratory Data Analysis, and SQL at MotherDuck, and he's built a long career in EDA. Hamilton and Tristan dive deep into the history of exploratory data analysis. Even if you spend most of your time below the frontend layer of the stack, it is important to understand the trends in both the practice of data visualization  and the technologies that underlie that practice.

Fo...

Fivetran recently passed $300 million ARR and has over 7,000 customers globally. Taylor Brown, the cofounder and COO of Fivetran, joins the show to talk about Fivetran's moat, the impact of AI on the data ingestion space, and open table formats and catalogs. 

For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sp...