Data Council Blog

Ready to be part of something extraordinary? Data Council 2025 is coming back to The Bay, and trust us – you won't want to miss this! Next year will be our biggest Data Council yet with real-life insights, breakthrough discussions and new connections that could shape your next big move.

Hey there, data geeks! We're going all-in on technical depth for Data Council 2025. Meet the industry leaders who‘ll be curating the most cutting-edge tracks in data & AI. No fluff, no marketing talks – just pure technical content from the trenches. Here's who’s crafting your learning experience at our SF Bay Area event this April 22-24.

Hey Data Council-ers!

This month, Lindsay MacDonald from Monte Carlo asks a critical question: Is data ready for GenAI? While AI seems ready to take off, are our data foundations really prepared? Let’s find out with this month’s roundup.

Here's our March 2021 roundup of links from across the web that we selected for you:

1. How to Build a Community (Fishtown Analytics)

Here's our February 2021 roundup of links from across the web that we picked for you:

1. dbt at Shopify (Data Engineering Podcast)

The Data Engineering Podcast recently featured a very interesting discussion about dbt at Shopify. Engineering manager Zeeshan Qureshi and senior data engineer Michelle Ark explained how dbt answered Shopify’s need for an SQL-based solution that its data scientists could use autonomously. They also mentioned some of the best practices they followed for staging, and cost considerations related to BigQuery. Last but not least, they touched on some extensions they are considering, such as implementing Great Expectations for data quality control.

Here's our January 2021 roundup of links from across the web that could be relevant to you:

1. Storing Cold Metadata with Alki (Dropbox)

Dropbox shared insights into Alki, the petabyte-scale metadata store it designed for infrequently accessed metadata (“cold data”). The post details how one-size-fits-all database Edgestore was reaching capacity limits, and why audit logs were a good candidate to be moved elsewhere than on costly SSDs. After considering off-the-shelf options, the team settled on building its own solution on top of AWS services: Alki; with DynamoDB as the hot store, and S3 as the cold store. Like HBase or Cassandra, Alki is based on log-structured merge-trees (LSM trees), but is better suited to handle hot-then-cold audit logs, as well as future use cases at Dropbox.