Timely and accurate data is a Holy Grail for each data practitioner. To make it real, data engineers have to be careful about the transformations they make before exposing the dataset to consumers, but they also need to understand the timeline of the data.
When I was learning about watermarks in Apache Flink, I saw they were taking the smallest event times instead of the biggest ones in Apache Spark Structured Streaming. From that I was puzzled... How is it possible the pipeline doesn't go back to the past? The answer came when I reread the Streaming Systems book. There was one keyword I had missed that clarified everything.
Data contracts was a hot topic in the data space before LLMs and GenAI came out. They promised a better world with less communication issues between teams, leading to more reliable and trustworthy data. Unfortunately, the promise has been too hard to put into practice. Has been, or should I write "was"?
Welcome to the second blog post dedicated to the previous Data+AI Summit. This time I'm going to share with you a summary of Apache Spark talks.
Welcome to the first Data+AI Summit 2024 retrospective blog post. I'm opening the series with the topic close to my heart at the moment, stream processing!
Last May I gave a talk about stream processing fallacies at Infoshare in Gdansk. Besides this speaking experience, I was also - and maybe among others - an attendee who enjoyed several talks in software and data engineering areas. I'm writing this blog post to remember them and why not, share the knowledge with you!
The blog shares the last fallacies for my 7 years stream processing journey.
Last week I was speaking in Gdansk on the DataMass track at Infoshare. As it often happens, the talk time slot impacted what I wanted to share but maybe it's for good. Otherwise, you wouldn't read stream processing fallacies!
As a data engineer you're certainly familiar with data skew. Yes, this bad phenomena where one task takes considerably more input than the others and often causes unexpected latency or failures. Turns out, stream processing also has its skew but more related to time.
It's technically possible to process files in a continuous way from a streaming job. However, if you are expecting some latency sensitive job, this will always be slower than processing data directly from a streaming broker. Why?
I must admit it, if you want to catch my attention, you can use some keywords. One of them is "stream". Knowing that, the topic of my new blog post shouldn't surprise you.
Even though nowadays data processing frameworks and data stores have smart query planners, they don't take our responsibility to correctly design the job logic.
One week later than initially announced, but here it is, the second part for Data+AI Summit 2023 retrospective. I don't know how, but I managed to include some streaming-related talks here too!
Even though you may be thinking now about Data+AI Summit 2024, I still owe you my retrospective for the 2023 edition. Let's start with the first part covering stream processing talks!
In our social media and marketing-driven era, it's quite hard to get things right. For me there is one common misconception brought by the Modern Data Stack idea that everything should be now ELT. In fact no, it shouldn't but only can.
That's the conference I've heard only recently about. What a huge mistake! Despite the lack of "data" word in the name, it covers many interesting data topics and before I share with you my notes from this year's Data+AI Summit, let me do the same for Berlin Buzzwords!
Welcome to the 3rd part of the series with great streaming and project organization blog posts summaries!
After a 2-years break, I had a chance to speak again, this time at the Big Data Warsaw 2023. Even though I couldn't be in Warsaw that day, I enjoyed the experience and also watched other sessions available through the conference platform.
Welcome to the 2nd part of the series with great streaming and project organization blog posts summaries!
Having a scalable architecture is the nowadays must but sometimes it may not be enough to provide consistent performance. Sometimes the business requirements, such as consistent delivery time or ordered delivery, can add some additional overhead. Consequently, scalability may not suffice. Fortunately, there are other mechanisms like backpressure that can be helpful.
