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 · last yr.

@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”.

@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...

Beyond Materialized Views: Using DuckDB for In-Process Columnar Caching

In this post we will talk about using DuckDB as the operational analytics store for the control plane of Striim Developer — a serverless…

medium.com

@marcbrooker.bsky.social breaks down how they've architected a fully ACID-compliant database service that combines simple, serverless management with high availability and massive scale on AWS Aurora DSQL. youtube.com/shorts/dScUi...

Distributed PostgreSQL with Aurora DSQL

YouTube video by Striim

youtube.com

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 · 2y ago

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...

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...

Andy Pavlo on Vector Databases

YouTube video by Striim

youtube.com

A side effect of LLMs: I'm taking on way more than I ever have in my life. I don't know if this is more productive or diluting myself. tbd!

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.

and that’s why I’m working on a Saturday morning 🫠

Your adversaries are taking (not my) Presidents Day off. Time to ship. 🚀

I’ll never forget where I was the day I learned oats could be milked.

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.

I'm not sure whether to be more amazed at the hate for FiveTran's price increase or the fact that Reddit doesn't know Striim exists and are proposing batch solutions to this persons obvious streaming CDC use case. www.reddit.com/r/dataengine...

They really gave the smell of rain an epic name: petrichor. They really did that.

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...

Real-Time RAG: Streaming Vector Embeddings and Low-Latency AI Search

Imagine 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 ...

striim.com

Remind me: 1,000 days.

Driving from SF to LA talking to ChatGPT about Kafka. I think that’s how schizo starts.

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.

youtu.be/9YSU-M0m1Jk?... When I saw the fire up the hill, I knew we wouldn't have much time to get out before the only escape road would become gridlocked. I texted my friends up on Lachman Ln an hour before they got an alert from the city to leave.

Escape from the Palisades: Split-second decision making, confusing responses

YouTube video by Los Angeles Times

m.youtube.com

It's 2025 why am I still explaining federation vs code conversion vs replication.

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 should be charging for this type of life coaching on LinkedIn.

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.

This gives me hope I’ll find all that data conference swag I never wore 🤞🏼

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...