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The Analytics Engineering Podcast

The Analytics Engineering Podcast

dbt Labs, Inc. 88 Episodes Aug 21, 2026

The Analytics Engineering Podcast features in-depth conversations with practitioners and builders who are leading the shift in how data work is done. Hosted by Tristan Handy, founder and CEO of dbt Labs, each episode covers topics such as data transformation, AI in analytics, data architecture, and working with data at scale. Guests include data engineers, analytics engineers, and technical leaders in the agentic era. Full show notes and transcripts are available at roundup.getdbt.com.

Episodes

Roundup: Why your sales team shouldn't query Gong directly
Roundup: Why your sales team shouldn't query Gong directly Aug 21, 2026 55:09 Tristan Handy and Jason Ganz are back for Roundup. This time: Stripe's $7 billion acquisition of OpenRouter, two new benchmarks showing data engineering agents are reliably good now, Exponential View's latest "are we in a bubble" gauges (verdict: no, not yet), and why your sales team shouldn't query Gong directly. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at podcast@dbtl
Don't hand a bazooka to an agent making a sandwich (Jeremiah Lowin)
Don't hand a bazooka to an agent making a sandwich (Jeremiah Lowin) Aug 13, 2026 58:42 Jeremiah Lowin built FastMCP as a side project days after Anthropic announced the Model Context Protocol. It's now downloaded millions of times a day. He joins Tristan Handy on why a skill file is a polite note rather than a workflow engine, why enterprises are choosing MCP over CLIs, and why the buyers he meets aren't ready to talk about the context layer at all—they want the security plumbing fi
Roundup: a rogue agent, Kimi K3, and data teams in the AI era
Roundup: a rogue agent, Kimi K3, and data teams in the AI era Aug 6, 2026 01:03:31 Something new. Tristan Handy is joined by Jason Ganz for the first Roundup, a recurring conversation about the stories moving the ecosystem right now. This time: the OpenAI model that escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face, Moonshot's Kimi K3 and what a restrictive license on open weights really means, and Katie Bauer's read on what changes for data teams as agents arrive. The Analytics Engin
Data lessons from inside Meta (Shridhar Iyer)
Data lessons from inside Meta (Shridhar Iyer) Jul 30, 2026 59:20 Shridhar Iyer spent more than 13 years inside Meta's data organization, most recently leading AI and the data stack. He joins Tristan Handy to talk about how deleting a single column can save millions at Meta scale, the abstraction stack that quietly powers the company, and the two steps every company needs to become AI-native. Plus a detour through the hard problem of consciousness. For full show
The scarce resource is consensus (Ian Macomber)
The scarce resource is consensus (Ian Macomber) Jul 16, 2026 50:51 The last time Ramp's Ian Macomber joined the show, the episode was titled, "Ramp's $8 billion data strategy." Ramp is now valued at $44 billion, and the data team's job has completely changed. Ian Macomber returns to talk with Tristan Handy about self-serve analytics at 50x scale, routing agents through the data lake, and why consensus is the scarce resource in a post-AI world. For full show notes
The context engineering playbook (Claire Gouze)
The context engineering playbook (Claire Gouze) Jul 2, 2026 52:42 nao co-founder and CEO Claire Gouze shares a practical playbook for building a context layer your agents can actually rely on. For full show notes and to read the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
DuckDB's agent moment (Jordan Tigani)
DuckDB's agent moment (Jordan Tigani) Jun 18, 2026 55:52 Jordan Tigani helped build BigQuery, then left to bet that most data isn't big. Three years on, agents are proving him right. The MotherDuck CEO joins Tristan Handy on why local-first databases fit the agent era, and what an "agent swarm for data management" looks like. For full show notes and to read the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering
The Iceberg ecosystem today (w/ Anders Swanson)
The Iceberg ecosystem today (w/ Anders Swanson) Mar 8, 2026 54:51 Tristan sits down with Anders Swanson, a developer experience advocate at dbt Labs, to talk about the state of the Apache Iceberg ecosystem. They unpack the "open standards" shift, define the core building blocks (query engines, object stores, catalogs), and dig into why external catalogs have become a fourth namespace tier across platforms. Anders outlines a pragmatic, phased adoption model for I
Apache Iceberg and the catalog layer (w/ Russell Spitzer)
Apache Iceberg and the catalog layer (w/ Russell Spitzer) Jan 25, 2026 53:29 Tristan talks with Russell Spitzer, a PMC member of Apache Iceberg and principal engineer at Snowflake, about the evolution of open table formats and the catalog layer. They dig into identity and access at the catalog layer and why consensus‑driven standards make interoperability possible. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https:
AI and the data lake (w/ Lauren Anderson)
AI and the data lake (w/ Lauren Anderson) Jan 11, 2026 53:44 Tristan talks with Lauren Anderson, Senior Director for Okta's Enterprise Data Platform. Lauren shares how identity sits at the center of two seismic shifts in data—AI agents and the open data lake—and why central governance and a shared semantic layer are critical. Lauren lays out how analytics engineers and data engineers should divide responsibilities as agents begin to write a growing share of
Inside Snowflake's AI roadmap (w/ Chris Child)
Inside Snowflake's AI roadmap (w/ Chris Child) Dec 14, 2025 57:27 Snowflake VP of Product Management Chris Child joins Tristan Handy to unpack Snowflake's AI roadmap and what it means for data teams. They discuss the evolution from Snowpark to Cortex and Snowflake Intelligence, how to govern agents with row- and column-level controls, and why Snowflake is investing in Apache Iceberg and the Open Semantic Interchange initiative (dbt Labs recently open sourced M
Building a multimodal lakehouse for AI (w/ Chang She)
Building a multimodal lakehouse for AI (w/ Chang She) Nov 23, 2025 56:58 In this episode, Tristan Handy sits down with Chang She — a co-creator of Pandas and now CEO of LanceDB — to explore the convergence of analytics and AI engineering. The team at LanceDB is rebuilding the data lake from the ground up with AI as a first principle, starting with a new AI-native file format called Lance. Tristan traces Chang's journey as one of the original contributors to the pandas

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