Data Discovery From Dashboards To Databases With Castor

Summary Every organization needs to be able to use data to answer questions about their business. The trouble is that the data is usually spread across a wide and shifting array of systems, from databases to dashboards. The other challenge is that even if you do find the information you are seeking, there might not be enough context available to determine how to use it or what it means. Castor is building a data discovery platform aimed at solving this problem, allowing you to search for and document details about everything from a database column to a business intelligence dashboard. In this episode CTO Amaury Dumoulin shares his perspective on the complexity of letting everyone in the company find answers to their questions and how Castor is designed to help. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management You listen to this show to learn about all of the latest tools, patterns, and practices that power data engineering projects across every domain. Now there’s a book that captures the foundational lessons and principles that underly everything that you hear about here. I’m happy to announce I collected wisdom from the community to help you in your journey as a data engineer and worked with O’Reilly to publish it as 97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/97things today to get your copy! When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Have you ever had to develop ad-hoc solutions for security, privacy, and compliance requirements? Are you spending too much of your engineering resources on creating database views, configuring database permissions, and manually granting and revoking access to sensitive data? Satori has built the first DataSecOps Platform that streamlines data access and security. Satori’s DataSecOps automates data access controls, permissions, and masking for all major data platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift and SQL Server and even delegates data access management to business users, helping you move your organization from default data access to need-to-know access. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/satori today and get a $5K credit for your next Satori subscription. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Amaury Dumoulin about Castor, a managed platform for easy data cataloging and discovery Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Castor is and the story behind it? The market for data catalogues is nascent but growing fast. What are the broad categories for the different products and projects in the space? What do you see as the core features that are required to be competitive? In what ways has that changed in the past 1 – 2 years? What are the opportunities for innovation and differentiation in the data catalog/discovery ecosystem? How do you characterize your current position in the market? Who are the target users of Castor? Can you describe the technical architecture and implementation of the Castor platform? How have the goals and design changed since you first began working on it? Can you talk through the workflow of getting Castor set up in an organization and onboarding the users? What are the design elements and platform features that allow for serving the various roles and stakeholders in an organization? What are the organizational benefits that you have seen from users adopting Castor or other data discovery/catalog systems? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Castor used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Castor? When is Castor the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of Castor? Contact Info Amaury Dumoulin Castor website Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Castor Atlan Podcast Episode dbt Podcast Episode Monte Carlo Podcast Episode Collibra Podcast Episode Amundsen Podcast Episode Airflow Podcast Episode Metabase Podcast Episode Airbyte Podcast Episode The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast