Distributed Data sessions

Track host

Baron Schwartz (VividCortex) is the founder and CTO of VividCortex, the best way to see what your production database servers are doing. Baron has written a lot of open source software and several books, including _High Performance MySQL_. He’s focused his career on learning and teaching about performance and observability of systems generally, including the view that teams are systems and culture influences their performance, and databases specifically.

11:35am–12:15pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Smooth scaling: Slack’s journey toward a new database

Location: Nassau Level: Intermediate

Secondary topics:  Resilient, Performant & Secure Distributed Systems

Ameet Kotian (Slack)

Average rating:

(5.00, 1 rating)

Slack’s rapid growth over the last few years outpaced the original database’s scaling capacity, which negatively impacted the company's customers and engineers. Ameet Kotian explains how a small team of engineers embarked on a journey for the right database solution, which eventually led them to Vitess, an open source cluster database. Read more.

2:25pm–3:05pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Trade-offs in resiliency: Managing the burden of data recoverability

Location: Nassau Level: Intermediate

Secondary topics:  Resilient, Performant & Secure Distributed Systems

Kristina Bennett (Google)

Average rating:

(3.50, 2 ratings)

Kristina Bennett shares best practices for practical data recoverability and shines a light onto some of the pitfalls awaiting the unwary, based on lessons learned from five years of data integrity tooling and consulting across Google. Read more.

3:50pm–4:30pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Kafka Streams in practice: What works and what doesn’t (yet)

Location: Nassau Level: Beginner

Secondary topics:  Resilient, Performant & Secure Distributed Systems

Bart De Vylder (CoScale)

Average rating:

(4.00, 2 ratings)

Bart De Vylder shares his experience migrating an existing codebase and production environment to Kafka Streams, a relatively new and promising streaming library. Join in to see what aspects worked remarkably well and the challenges he ran into along the way. Read more.

4:45pm–5:25pm Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Sell cron, buy Airflow: Modern data pipelines in finance

Location: Nassau Level: Beginner

Secondary topics:  Resilient, Performant & Secure Distributed Systems

James Meickle (Quantopian)

Average rating:

(5.00, 2 ratings)

Quantopian integrates financial data from vendors around the globe. As the scope of its operations outgrew cron, the company turned to Apache Airflow, a distributed scheduler and task executor. James Meickle explains how in less than six months, Quantopian was able to rearchitect brittle crontabs into resilient, recoverable pipelines defined in code to which anyone could contribute. Read more.

1:30pm–2:10pm Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Migrating a recommendations platform from bare metal to the cloud

Location: Nassau Level: Intermediate

Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure

Leemay Nassery (Comcast)

Average rating:

(2.00, 1 rating)

Leemay Nassery discusses the importance of data collection pipelines and explains how to efficiently store datasets with the intention of making them easily accessible by a downstream machine learning platform. Read more.

3:50pm–4:30pm Wednesday, October 3, 2018

How do we solve the world's spreadsheet problem?

Location: Nassau Level: Intermediate

Secondary topics:  Distributed State

Alexander Rasmussen (Freenome)

In the past five years, Alexander Rasmussen has spent a lot of time trying to get high-integrity data out of spreadsheets and into databases. Alexander explores common data integrity problems when dealing with spreadsheet data, investigates whether those integrity problems are inescapable, and shares ongoing work to mitigate them. Read more.