Column by your name: The analytics database that skips the rows

Column by your name: The analytics database that skips the rows

These days, every company looking at analyzing their data for insights has a data pipeline setup. Many companies have a fast production database, often a NoSQL or key-value store, that goes through a data pipeline.The pipeline process performs some sort of extract-transform-load process on it, then routes it to a larger data store that the analytics tools can access. But what if you could skip some steps and speed up the process with a database purpose-built for analytics?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Rohit (Ro) Amarnath, the CTO at Vertica, to find out how your analytics engine can speed up your workflow. After a humble beginning with a ZX Spectrum 128, he’s now in charge of Vertica Accelerator, a SaaS version of the Vertica database.

Vertica was founded by database researcher Dr. Michael Stonebreaker and Andrew Palmer. Dr. Stonebreaker helped develop several databases, including Postgres, Streambase, and VoltDB. Vertica was born out of research into purpose-built databases. Stonebreaker’s research found that columnar database storage was faster for data warehouses because there were fewer read/writes per request.

Here’s a quick example that shows how columnar databases work. Suppose that you want all the records from a specific US state or territory. There are 52 possible values here (depending on how you count territories). To find all instances of a single state in a row-based DB, the search must check every row for the value of the state column. However, searching by column is faster by an order of magnitude: it just runs down the column to find matching values, then retrieves row data for the matches.

The Vertica database was designed specifically for analytics as opposed to transactional databases. Ro spent some time at a Wall Street firm building reports—P&L, performance, profitability, etc. Transactions were important to day-to-day operations, but the real value of data came from analyses that showed where to cut costs or increase investments in a particular business. Analytics help with overall strategy, which tends to be more far-reaching and effective.

For most of its life, Vertica has been an on-premises database managing a data warehouse. But with the ease of cloud storage, Vertica Accelerator is looking to give you a data lake as a service. If you’re unfamiliar, data lakes take the data warehouse concept—central storage for all your data—and remove limits. You can have “rivers” of data flowing into your stores; if you go from a terabyte to a petabyte overnight, your cloud provider will handle it for you.

Vertica has worked with plenty of industries that push massive amounts of data: healthcare, aviation, online games. They’ve built a lot of functionality into the database itself to speed up all manner of applications. One of their prospective customers had a machine learning model with thousands of lines of code that was reduced to about ten lines because so much was being done in the database itself.

In the future, Vertica plans to offer more powerful management of data warehouses and lakes, including handling the metadata that comes with them. To learn more about Vertica’s analytics databases, check out our conversation or visit their website.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Containers are easy—moving your legacy system off your VM is not

Containers are easy—moving your legacy system off your VM is not

Ryan sits down with Dan Ciruli, VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix, to talk about getting your virtual machines and Kubernetes to play nice in cloud-native environments, why VMs are still relevant in enterprise applications, and how AI can help modernize legacy systems. Episode notes: Nutanix combines compute, storage, virtualization, and networking so you can run applications and manage data across on-premises datacenters, public clouds, and edge locations all on one platform. Connect with Dan on Linkedin and Bluesky.Congrats to Necromancer badge winner David Ferenczy Rogožan! They won the badge on their answer to Where does adb shell mkdir create directories.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

26 Dec 31min

Settle down, nerds. AI is a normal technology

Settle down, nerds. AI is a normal technology

Ryan welcomes Anil Dash, writer and former Stack Overflow board member, back to the show to discuss how AI is not a magical technology, but rather the normal next step in computing’s evolution. They explore the importance of democratizing access to technology, the unique challenges that LLMs’ non-determinism poses, and how developers can keep Stack Overflow’s ethos of community alive in a world of AI. Episode notes: Anil is a tech entrepreneur (former CEO at our sister company Fog Creek Software) and writer. You can find him at his blog anildash.com and on Linkedin. Check out the last time Anil was on the pod in 2020 to talk all things Glitch and Glimmer. Shoutout to user pgrad for winning a Lifejacket badge on their answer to Using type hint Any in Django - NameError: name 'Any' is not defined.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

23 Dec 37min

Last week in AWS re:Invent with Corey Quinn

Last week in AWS re:Invent with Corey Quinn

Ryan sits down with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, at AWS re:Invent to get Corey’s patented snarky take on all the happenings from the conference. They discuss whether the AI agent hype is supported by actual buyers, how startups are faring as AWS focuses on large enterprises, and how many of the new technologies coming out this year will actually be transformative. Episode notes:This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events on our blog. Duckbill provides financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.Connect with Corey on Linkedin and subscribe to his newsletter Last Week in AWS.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

19 Dec 23min

Live from re:Invent…it’s Stack Overflow!

Live from re:Invent…it’s Stack Overflow!

Ryan is joined by Stack Overflow’s CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and Director of Data Science Michael Foree on the floor at re:Invent to discuss all they’ve seen and heard at the event, from the future of AI agents to the trust issues the enterprise has around AI and the impact of AI and robotics on the job market.Episode Notes:This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events from the floor on our blog. Connect with Prashanth on LinkedIn.Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

16 Dec 31min

Interface is everything, and everything is an interface

Interface is everything, and everything is an interface

Ryan talks with Wesley Yu, head of engineering at Metalab, about the evolution of interfaces in technology, the pressure that UI generated on the fly would put on your backend systems, and why AI is just the latest and fanciest in a long line of CRUD apps. Episode notes:Metalab designs interfaces for top brands around the world, helping them design, build, and ship their products.Connect with Wesley on Twitter and LinkedIn.Congrats to Populist badge winner SiddAjmera, who won the badge for their answer to Angular FormControl check if required.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

12 Dec 24min

AI is a crystal ball into your codebase

AI is a crystal ball into your codebase

Ryan is joined by Kayvon Beykpour, CEO and founder of Microscope, to dive into AI-powered code review’s potential for managing large codebases, the need for humans-in-the-loop for reviewing PRs so AI tools can efficiently and effectively debug, and how AI can increase visibility through summarization at the abstract syntax tree level and high signal-to-noise ratio code reviews.Episode notes:Macroscope helps you understand your code through AI-powered code review, automated PR descriptions, and real-time status reportsConnect with Kayvon on Twitter and LinkedIn.This week’s shoutout goes to user Jesper Grann Laursen for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Exclude Table during pg_restore. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

9 Dec 34min

Treating your agents like microservices

Treating your agents like microservices

Ryan is joined by Outshift by Cisco’s VP of Engineering Guillaume De Saint Marc to discuss the future of multi-agent architectures as microservices, the challenges and limitations of the infrastructure for these multi-agent systems, and the importance of communication protocols and interoperability in order to build decentralized and scalable architectures. Episode notes:Outshift is Cisco’s tech incubator that pursues emerging technologies like agentic AI, quantum computing, and next-gen infrastructure. Learn more about multi-agent architecture at their open-source collective AGNTCY.Connect with Guillaume on Linkedin. Today we’re shouting out a Socratic badge winner, Avraam Mavridis, who won the badge for asking well received questions on 100 separate days. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

5 Dec 35min

Abstraction, but for robots

Abstraction, but for robots

Ryan welcomes Simone Kalmakis, VP of Engineering at Viam, to dive into how her team is bridging the gap between software and robotics, the importance of abstraction layers in making robotics more accessible, and the real-world applications of robotics from lobster traps to industrial sanding robots.Episode notes:Viam is a robotics platform that brings modern software development tools into hardware applications. Connect with Simone on Linkedin. This week’s shoutout goes to Lifejacket winner Sergey Kalinichenko for their answer to How does this K&R code for reading an int work?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

2 Dec 24min

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