John Kutay

John Kutay

@jkxosound.com

Product & Engineering @ Striim (streaming sql, change data capture), creator/host @ What's New in Data pod, music @ jkxo

2.1K followers346 following288 posts

John Kutay reposted

Fun conversation with @jkxosound.com about where I think things are going in the AI agents space, Strands Agents, and rats 🐀

John Kutay@jkxosound.com

@clare.dev is one of the leaders making AI engineering simple and scalable at AWS. Had a great time chatting with her as we discussed Strands Agents and patterns like “Retrieval as a Tool”.

Really appreciate the depth at which the Hex team broke down their Text-to-SQL implementation. Everyone's trying to teach LLMs SQL like it's a training problem but it's really a graph traversal problem.

In my post about #DuckDB I digress into the role of the database buffer cache to discuss how we segregate transactional workloads from analytical. DuckDB turned out to be a natural, lightweight approach to offloading analytical queries ensuring our application upheld performance requirements.

Instead of materialized views, we built in-process DuckDB caching in the control plane of Striim Developer — improving query performance 5–10x with zero added infra. PostgreSQL for OLTP, DuckDB for Operational OLAP. But I won't call it HTAP 🤐 medium.com/striim/beyon...

medium.comBeyond Materialized Views: Using DuckDB for In-Process Columnar CachingIn this post we will talk about using DuckDB as the operational analytics store for the control plane of Striim Developer — a serverless…

This was actually my longest podcast ever at over 70 minutes. Not sure I could have made it any shorter because nerding out on databases with Andy Pavlo was too fun.

John Kutay@jkxosound.com

Was super fun chatting with @andypavlo.bsky.social to kick off the new season of What's New in Data. We dive into vector databases, text to sql, trends in data infrastructure, and Andy's awesome (and open) database course. youtube.com/shorts/tjLmx...

Just found out one of the internal b2b CRUD app vendors is more like CRD because it doesn't support updating submissions. AI gonna cook that sector so hard.

Them: Wait so you're saying I don't need to deploy Kafka? Me: No Them: Kinesis? Me: No Them: Zookeeper? YARN? Me: No Them: Will you write every record to disk and replicate it? Me: No Unfortunately the bar of complexity for streaming has been set so high. I'm calling it Streamholm Syndrome.

A single Striim cluster (multi-node for scalability and fault tolernace) can handle 35k, very wide, very active databases that produce millions of DML per hour hour and dozens of DDL per day. The 'intelligence' layer or Striim was able to apply rule based logic on how to handle complex DDL.

I will die on this hill but MySQL's 'Alter Table Add Column AFTER' DDL is pointless. It doesn't change the layout on disk. If you care about order of the columns, that's purely a read side construct and you should address it in your query not your DDL!

We’ve shifted embedding generation and transformers left into the streaming layer to support near real-time RAG. Take a read if you want to hear the optimizations we made for change data capture and incremental embedding generation. www.striim.com/blog/real-ti...

striim.comReal-Time RAG: Streaming Vector Embeddings and Low-Latency AI SearchImagine searching for products on an online store by simply typing “best eco-friendly toys for toddlers under $50” and getting instant, accurate results—while the inventory is synchronized seamlessly ...

I always love seeing clovers in the wild! Knowing every transaction is streamed to Snowflake in real time with Striim’s streaming CDC service. We do a lot of work to ensure transactions are bound reliably and replicated with no duplicates while maintaining low latency.

As someone taking inventory of receipts of everything I ever owned, I regret every single purchase I didn't make online because its so hard to find the receipt.

I was really surprised to hear a data team ask me how replication will impact their database and had legit concerns. Database providers need to do a better job making sure their developers have confidence deploying for HA.

MAGA narrative has infiltrated the Palisades fire. The truth is there was lots of low and mixed income apartments along Sunset in my area (Marquez) and near the high school. Those residents deserve to come back home too. Some had been there for decades.

Transaction logs and their respective interfaces are a bit of a complicated topic and SQLServer has some unique challenges. I'd say its quite different from Oracle's redo log and how OSS databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL approach logical replication. We worked on making the first in-memory log...

interface for SQLServer. You can subscribe to a stream of changes for a SQLServer database and publish it to any number of consumers using Striim's ordered in-memory streams. Some good use cases for this are replication for HA/DR purposes, heterogenous replication, and CDC to data lakes.

John Kutay reposted

Replying to @ryxcommar.bsky.social

“The executives want a report on why so many customers churned last quarter but I told them they need to wait for me to build an interoperable data lake using an open table format like Netflix did (we’re a 50 person startup).”

After a year of record breaking growth for Striim, it was great to celebrate our wins and plan for the future. We defied gravity, solved problems that companies 1000x our size couldn't solve, won 20% of the Fortune 100 and 4 of the Fortune 10. Here's to a great 2025. Data Streaming 🚀

My neighbor Chuck always went all out making Halloween a spectacle on our block. Seeing him on the news was heartbreaking but equally inspiring. If he’s rebuilding, we know the neighborhood is coming back better than ever.

SQLServer’s approach to logging is great for recovery and homogenous replication but lacks mature layers of abstraction. Without a direct interface to logs, SQL Server relies on undocumented functions or CDC tables (which adds overhead). We've solved the latter with our SQL2Fabric solution.

An unspoken requirement of data engineering is looking at raw, ambiguous data and figuring out how to turn it into accurate business insights. Hiding in infrastructure development to isolate yourself from business meaning is counterproductive.

We'll find out that the hidden, undisclosed costs of training DeepSeek were closer to $1b/year soon enough. Anyways, good opportunity for the laggards to buy NVIDIA shares.

I was reading Steinbeck's “Of Mice and Men” in a guest room offered to us by generous strangers. The foreword described families leaving the Dust Bowl, leaving clouds of dust behind, looking for a better life in California with only what they could carry. Hmmm...anyways where should we move to? 😂

Playing tennis and my opponent hits an amazing shot Me: wtf how did they do that? This will be a tough match. Them: wtf how did I do that? Going to need more luck to win this match.