My Experience at Data Council Austin 2023: Day 3
There were a lot of great speaker sessions AND authentic Austin brisket today. It’s the last day of Data Council. Everyone looks a bit tired but also felt a bit sad to say goodbye 👋 to the conference and amazing old/new friends we just met in person. My energy level is low 🪫 but I need to finish what I started. So this is the last post about the Data Council 2023. You may check the other 3 for what happened earlier this week:
Let me started with this interesting machine:
I happened to find this amazing machine in the demo booth area today. The vendor (Privacy Dynamics) is so smart that they offer the best coffee in the conference venue. (I had to admit I like the conference a lot but was not impressed for the meals and coffees) It was such a great experience to have a very nice espresso in the morning, and watched this smart espresso to measure pressure/flow/temperature and even connected with the scale to auto-stop the flow.
I worked as booth staff for many times. Everyone basically does the same thing. T-shirts, socks, stickers, water bottle, recorded demo and pamphlets. It’s a clear 💡 and effective idea to bring a smart espresso machine in the room and talk about your product when you make coffee ☕️ (1 minute to grind the beans, 1 min for distributor and tamper, warm up the basket …).
It worked for me at least. While I was waiting for the espresso, I got a fairly good understanding of their product/service, which is to anonymize data for data engineering, analytics, ML, etc. There are lots of libraries to generate random data for almost every programming languages. But generating meaningful data based on existing patterns or raw data is still a big market with strong use cases (PII, SOC2, HIPAA, etc). I also talked to folks from YData during the conference, and I am sure there are many more in the conference and the market.
I skipped the opening keynote because of a VC talk. Starting from 10am, there were a series of great talk in the Data Streaming track.
Frank is really a scientist who happens to work in the data streaming. Super smart, fast-talking and very nice.
Gunnar Morling was at QCon London this Monday and came to Austin for Data Council. Debezium is almost the default tool to get latest database changes and recently added the feature to write back to databases.
The following session from Timo Walther was even better (sorry Gunnar)
He has presented Flink/FlinkSQL many times in different conferences, even in some webinars for Immerok. He made it very clear Flink SQL is not a database. Recently Flink Table Store became Apache Paimon as an incubation project of ASF, and this is his take:
I had high expectation for “Real-time Schema Discovery” as 1st session in the afternoon.
Maybe it’s just me: 🥲 is the right emoji.
I made a very hard choice not to join the session from ByteWax CEO. I definitely will check the recording to learn more about this pure-Python streaming processing.
Instead I attended the session “Introducing Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)” from Matt Topol. He is a fun guy and very passionate to promote Arrow in the Modern Data Stack. I chatted with him about 1 hour in the 🍺 party. He shared the interesting story how he wrote the book about Arrow and got hired to write more code and give more talks for Arrow. I do see the high potential of Arrow to play a bigger row in the Modern Data Stack, or even CPU/GPU/AI world. 🤭
The last speaker session I listened was from Freewheel, sharing how to process billions of Ad-tech events in real-time. I am not too surprised to see such complex stack, and they have good reasons why multiple OLAP, BI and query systems are used.
They even shared their guiding principles:
Make sense. But I think there are rooms to improve or simplify/unify.
As the last night at Austin, we enjoyed the great live music, nice local cocktail and good conversations together.
🤟 that’s the end of this blog series. No summary. Just amazing experience.
