DataFusion - The Database Building Toolkit (with Andrew Lamb)

More from Developer Voices

1. 

   5 Jun 2025 · 1 hr 29 min

   Making Apache Kafka Diskless (with Filip Yonov & Josep Prat)

   How do you retrofit a clustered data-processing system to use cheap commodity storage? That's the big question in this episode as we look at one of the many attempts to build a version of Kafka that uses object storage services like S3 as its main disk, sacrificing a little latency for cheap, infinitely-scalable disks. There are several companies trying to walk down that road, and it's clearly big business - one of them recently got bought out for a rumoured $250m. But one of them is actively trying to get those changes back into the community, as are pushing to make Apache Kafka speak…

2. 

   23 May 2025 · 1 hr 24 min

   Java's Cutting Edge Comeback (with Josh Long)

   Java's has been evolving faster than any 30 year old language has a right to do, and there's probably no-one more pleased about it than my guest this week - Josh Long. He's a Java & Kotlin programming, a JVM enthusiast in general, and an advocate for Spring, and he has chapters full of news about what's been happening in Javaland over the past few years. Everything from new threading models to C interop changes, custom primitives to high performance computing and all the ways in which Java is modernising for age of AI workloads. If you're out of touch with the latest in the JVM, or don't…

3. 

   8 May 2025 · 1 hr 12 min

   The State & Future of Apache Kafka (with Anatoly Zelenin)

   I'm joined this week by one of the authors of Apache Kafka In Action, to take a look at the state of Kafka, event systems & stream-processing technology. It's an approach (and a whole market) that's had at least a decade to mature, so how has it done? What does Kafka offer to developers and businesses, and which parts do they actually care about? What have streaming data systems promised and what have they actually delivered? What's still left to build? – Apache Kafka in Action: https://www.manning.com/books/apache-kafka-in-action Pat Helland, Data on the Inside vs Data on the Outside:…

4. 

   10 Apr 2025 · 1 hr 29 min

   Jupyter's Architecture Unpacked (with Afshin Darian & Sylvain Corlay)

   Jupyter's become an incredibly popular programming and data science tool, but how does it actually work? How have they built an interactive language execution engine? And if we understand the architecture, what else could it be used for? Joining me to look inside the Jupyter toolbox are Afshin Darian and Sylvain Corlay, two of Jupyters long-standing contributors and project-steerers. They've going to take us on a journey that starts with today's userbase, goes through the execution protocol and ends with a look at what Jupyter will be in the future - an ambitious framework for interactive,…

5. 

   27 Mar 2025 · 1 hr 21 min

   Nix, The Build-Everything Language (with Julian Arni)

   Ever since we invented makefiles, the programming world has been wrestling with the problem of building software stacks reliably. This week we're going to look at one of the most ambitious solutions available - Nix. Nix tries to do everything from invoking your compiler to installing your language, and even providing your operating system. But how does it work in theory, and how well does it work in practice? Joining me to discuss is Julian Arni, a Nix-enthusiast and creator of a build/test/deploy service called Garnix. Nix has been one of my go-to tools for years - I hope it'll find its way…

6. 

   13 Mar 2025 · 1 hr 18 min

   Graphite: Image Editing as a Syntax Tree (with Keavon Chambers & Dennis Kobert)

   Graphite is a new image editor with an interesting architecture - it's a classic UI-driven app, an image-manipulation language, and a library of programmable graphics primitives that any Rust coder could use, extend or add to. The result is something that you can use like Photoshop or Inkscape, or make use of in batch pipelines, a bit like ImageMagick. Joining me to discuss it are Keavon Chambers & Dennis Kobert, who are hammering away on building a project that's potentially as demanding as Photoshop, but with a more ambitious architecture. How can they hope to compete? Perhaps in the short…

7. 

   25 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 22 min

   How Would You Type-Check 30 Million Lines of PHP? (with Julien Verlaguet)

   How would you manage 30 million lines of PHP? You can't rewrite it - you'd be fired long before you delivered. That was the problem facing Facebook around 2011, and their answer was to add a type system, giving birth to the Hack language. But adding types to PHP turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was building a type checker that developers used to "edit, save, refresh" would actually tolerate. So how do you type-check tens of millions of lines of code fast enough that nobody notices? Julien Verlaguet co-designed Hack at Facebook, and has spent the fifteen years since chasing a…

8. 

   26 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 46 min

   DuckDB And The Burden of Success (with Hannes Mühleisen)

   Building something people actually want is supposed to be the happy ending. But it arrives with a bill attached: feature requests you didn't ask for, pull requests you'd rather not maintain forever, users demanding the one thing you swore you'd never build, and — if you're unlucky — a company where the sales team quietly starts deciding what engineering works on. DuckDB has spent the last two and a half years working through that list. So how do you stay a database engineering team when success keeps trying to turn you into something else? Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator of DuckDB, is back to…

9. 

   12 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

   The Enterprise AI Gap (with James Brown)

   My guest this week is James Brown, an engineering lead at Schroders, and that's a useful vantage point — asset managers carry all the regulation and organisational weight of a bank, mixed with the first-to-market pressure of a startup. James starts with his own "Claude mania": months of agents running around the clock, and the wave of anxiety that hit him one morning walking to the shop without one running at home. From there, Clair — the plugin he's building to give coding agents proximal awareness of each other, using git orphan branches as a zero-infrastructure message bus; why AI behaves…

10. 

    8 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 5 min

    What If Every SQL Query Could Update Incrementally? (with Lalith Suresh)

    There's a problem that's bugged the database industry since the 1980s: you run an expensive query over millions of rows, cache the result, and then a single new row arrives. Logically that's one small update, but most engines throw the cached answer away and recompute everything from scratch. Some will handle changes incrementally, but only for "simple" queries - and the rules for what counts as simple are arbitrary and brittle. So can you incrementally maintain *any* SQL query, no matter how complex? For decades the answer was no. Then an award-winning paper called DBSP proved that the…

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