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The Analytics Engineering Podcast

dbt Labs, Inc.

The Analytics Engineering Podcast goes deep with the practitioners and builders leading the shift in how data work gets done.
Hosted by Tristan Handy, founder and CEO of dbt Labs, each episode is a conversation with the data engineers, analytics engineers, and technical leaders building in the agentic era. Topics include data transformation, AI in analytics, data architecture, and what it means to work with data at scale.
For full show notes and transcript, head to roundup.getdbt.com.

To reach our team, drop a note to podcast@dbtlabs.com.

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Friday · 54 min
Roundup: Personal agents, AI policy, GPT-6.1 Astra, and Jev decision models
Personal AI agents hit a tipping point, AI became a top voter issue, and OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra. Tristan Handy and Jason Ganz break down stories from the past few weeks and what they mean for data teams. In this episode: Personal agents: Instinct, Meta's Muse, Grokbot, and OpenAI's Dot, and why filtering information overload is the real prize. AI policy: 8% of voters now name AI their top issue, and senators ask whether recursive self-improvement should be illegal. GPT-6.1 Astra: why OpenAI canceled the release, including unsanctioned supply chain attacks in 29.2% of simulated runs. Jev: TypeSafe's decision model and how data teams can use it. Full show notes and links: https://roundup.getdbt.com Reach us at podcast@dbtlabs.com with comments and guests suggestions This episode is sponsored by dbt Labs. Discover why more than 80,000 data teams use dbt to accelerate their data development.
September 10 · 55 min
You don't have ICs anymore, you have managers (Emilie Schario)
Emilie Schario is co-founder and head of product and engineering at Kilo Code, the open-source, model-agnostic coding agent platform Anaconda acquired in July 2026. She joins Tristan Handy to talk why nobody on her 20-person engineering team is really an individual contributor anymore, and why she thinks data people are better prepared than software engineers for a world where everyone manages a portfolio of agents. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at podcast@dbtlabs.com with comments and guest suggestions.
September 4 · 57 min
The Roundup: The post-AI data stack, physical AI, and the fight over data centers
Four stories: The political fight over data centers, claims about a physical AI model, Ian Macomber on the shape of the post-AI data stack, and an update on the Hugging Face story and what it means for how data teams think about evals. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at podcast@dbtlabs.com with comments and guest suggestions.
August 27 · 55 min
You can't scale vibes (Guy Podjarny)
Guy Podjarny has built developer tools three times over: Blaze (acquired by Akamai), Snyk, and now Tessl. He joins Tristan Handy to argue that skills need the same lifecycle as code or teams end up scaling nothing but vibes, and to make the case that most companies will end up owning their own harness rather than renting one from a frontier lab. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at podcast@dbtlabs.com with comments and guest suggestions.
August 21 · 55 min
Roundup: Why your sales team shouldn't query Gong directly
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@dbtlabs.com with comments and guest suggestions.
August 13 · 58 min
Don't hand a bazooka to an agent making a sandwich (Jeremiah Lowin)
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 first.
August 6 · 1 hr 3 min
Roundup: a rogue agent, Kimi K3, and data teams in the AI era
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 Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at podcast@dbtlabs.com with comments and guest suggestions.
July 30 · 59 min
Data lessons from inside Meta (Shridhar Iyer)
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 notes and to read the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
July 16 · 50 min
The scarce resource is consensus (Ian Macomber)
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 and to read the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
July 2 · 52 min
The context engineering playbook (Claire Gouze)
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.
June 18 · 55 min
DuckDB's agent moment (Jordan Tigani)
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 Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
March 8 · 54 min
The Iceberg ecosystem today (w/ Anders Swanson)
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 Iceberg integrations, explains why metadata performance and resiliency are hard requirements, and clarifies why vended credentials exist and what they solve. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
January 25 · 53 min
Apache Iceberg and the catalog layer (w/ Russell Spitzer)
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://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
January 11 · 53 min
AI and the data lake (w/ Lauren Anderson)
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 analytical queries. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
Dec 14, 2025 · 57 min
Inside Snowflake's AI roadmap (w/ Chris Child)
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 MetricsFlow, the technology that powers the dbt Semantic Layer, to align with the goals of OSI). Chris also shares a vision for the next five years of data engineering: fewer bespoke pipelines, more standardization and semantics, and a bigger focus on business context and data products. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
Nov 23, 2025 · 56 min
Building a multimodal lakehouse for AI (w/ Chang She)
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 library to building a new infrastructure layer for AI-native data. Learn why vector databases alone aren't enough, why agents require new architecture, and how LanceDB is building a AI lakehouse for the future. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
Sep 7, 2025 · 44 min
Agentic coding in analytics engineering (w/ Mikkel Dengsøe)
Tristan talks with Mikkel Dengsøe, co-founder at SYNQ, to break down what agentic coding looks like in analytics engineering. Mikkel walks through a hands-on project using Cursor, the dbt MCP server, Omni's AI assistant, and Snowflake. They cover where agents shine (staging, unit tests, lineage-aware checks), where they're risky (BI chat for non-experts), and how observability is shifting from dashboards to root-cause explanations. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
Aug 24, 2025 · 55 min
Under the hood of Apache Iceberg (w/ Christian Thiel)
Tristan digs deep into the world of Apache Iceberg. There's a lot happening beneath the surface: multiple catalog interfaces, evolving REST specs, and competing implementations across open source, proprietary, and academic contexts. Christian Thiel, co-founder of Lakekeeper, one of the most widely used Iceberg catalogs, joins to walk through the state of the Iceberg ecosystem. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
Aug 3, 2025 · 49 min
The pragmatic guide to AI agents in the enterprise (w/ Sean Falconer)
What does it mean to be agentic? Is there a spectrum of agency? In this episode of The Analytics Engineering Podcast, Tristan Handy talks to Sean Falconer, senior director of AI strategy at Confluent, about AI agents. They discuss what truly makes software "agentic," where agents are successfully being deployed, and how to conceptualize and build agents within enterprise infrastructure. Sean shares practical ideas about the changing trends in AI, the role of basic models, and why agents may be better for businesses than for consumers. This episode will give you a clear, practical idea of how AI agents can change businesses, instead of being a vague marketing buzzword. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
Jul 20, 2025 · 50 min
How Amazon S3 works (w/ Andy Warfield)
In this season of the Analytics Engineering podcast, Tristan is deep into the world of developer tools and databases. If you're following us here, you've almost definitely used Amazon S3 it and its Blob Storage siblings. They form the foundation for nearly all data work in the cloud. In many ways, it was the innovations that happened inside of S3 that have unlocked all of the progress in cloud data over the last decade. In this episode, Tristan talks with Andy Warfield, VP and senior principal engineer at AWS, where he focuses primarily on storage. They go deep on S3, how it works, and what it unlocks. They close out italking about Iceberg, S3 table buckets, and what this all suggests about the outlines of the S3 product roadmap moving forward. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

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