Cuttings

Hey dataBS, what’s your go-to explainer for the different types of SQL JOIN?

seems pretty legit, but since the topic seems to be near the top of every SEO growth hack 🤢 for any company vaguely DB-related, I figure there are going to be a few out there…

Even if you disagree with the labels, I found this worked example of the different stages of working with data useful

what’s the smartest, slickest, interactive visual explainer of how a technology works that you’ve seen?

For example, this kind of thing

🎧 Two excellent podcasts that I listened to over the weekend:

🌟 @communitypulse.bsky.social - The Decline of Technical Influencers

🌟 @joereis.bsky.social speaking to @tlberglund.bsky.social about The Art of Developer Relations, Hardware Hacking, and More https://pca.st/sg4hv51z

Couple of big announcements from @cloudflare.social today for folk in dataBS:

• Acquisition of Arroyo, launch of Pipelines for streaming ingestion:
• Launch of R2 Data Catalog—a managed Apache Iceberg catalog for R2 https://blog.cloudflare.com/r2-data-catalog-public-beta/

How best to meal-plan for a family? Using multi-agent AI of course! Love this practical and entertaining idea from Sean Falconer

“A manifesto for everyone stuck in the system that keeps crashing you.”

Thoughtworks have published their latest TWTechRadar.

A few ‘blips’ (as they call them) of note in the data space:

🟢 Adopt: Data product thinking 🟢 Adopt: Trino 👍 Trial: Databricks Delta Live Tables 👍 Trial: @metabase.com ✋ Hold: Reverse ETL

TIL the new DuckDB UI stores its data in a local file, ~/.duckdb/extension_data/ui—in a DuckDB DB, of course :)

Much as I love kcat (🤫 it’ll always be kafkacat to me…), this morning I nearly fell out with it 👇

😖 I thought I was going stir crazy, after listing topics on a broker and seeing topics from a different broker. 😵‍💫 WTF 😵‍💫 Turns out that the ~/.config.kcat.conf I created last week and was so proud to thinking to do takes 🚨PRIORITY🚨 over any CLI arguments provided.

So I was merrily telling it with CLI flag -b to use broker X and it was merrily listing topics from broker Y that’s specified in the config file.

I still like the config file idea (@Kris Jenkins wrote a nice blog article about it here: I just need to remember about it next time 🤦

Looking forward to Monster SCALE Summit hosted by @scylladb.com which starts tomorrow. Tons of cool talks, and free to virtually attend :)

Register here:

Here are some of my picks 👇

r/apachekafka just hit 19k members!

If you’re interested in apachekafka, and don’t mind the Reddit vibe, come and join us :)

I love the hypothesis behind this thorough data analysis from @jmspae.se: “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab”

As always, clear and thoughtful writing from @vanlightly.bsky.social, here looking at how data virtualization enabled by OTFs fits into data architectures now and future.

ApacheFlink 1.20.1 released

> This release includes 75 bug fixes, vulnerability fixes, and minor improvements for Flink 1.20

Don’t get caught out! CfP for Current2025 in London closes on MONDAY!

Whether it’s a compelling tale of Kafka, a fascinating session about Flink, or an inspirational idea about Iceberg, this is where to speak to folk in the data & streaming community :)

ApacheFlink CDC 3.3 has been released!

Highlights include new transforms and pipeline connectors for Flink CDC, improvements to the CDC connectors, and support for Flink 1.19+.

Excellent @oxide.computer and friends podcast about technical blogging. Make sure you give it a listen—there’s some great history and nostalgia in there from @tbray.org and @will-snow.bsky.social, and a ton of great practical advice too.

Too many vendors post completely half-assed year-in-review or year-ahead posts—which makes this post from Andy Pavlo so refreshing to read. Hugely informative and wittingly written too