Reynold Xin

speaker

331 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 24 Jun

Reynold Xin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast · Why the Frontier Ecosystem must be Open — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin, Databricks · 24 Jun 2026 podcast

Wait, so prototype what?

Prototype, instead of storing the data in the data lake in the row-oriented format, like Postgres pages, write them in Parquet.

And he just made the observation that, hey, our storage fleet has a lot of extra idle CPUs.

And we could use those CPUs to do the transcoding from row to column, where row is good for LTP, but column is good for analytics.

So let's do that transcoding at that time.

And as a matter of fact, once you transcode the data, the data compresses better.

So from those services writing to, for example, S3 or other data lake, like object stores, you can actually write them faster because they are now smaller.

So there's no overhead.

It's no compromise in performance.

Some CPU overhead.

Yeah, but we had extra CPUs anyway.

We had that fleet anyway.

So the debate ended.

I mean, it's one of the classics of a tech issue of a lot of debate, but then somebody actually went ahead and just tried to prototype it and it worked.

Nothing like that.

We were debating in many, many meetings, and then we're just debating whether it's possible or not from first principle, and then somebody just did it.

Especially these days, I think, with AI, it's actually easier to do.

c-suite of like large companies and like i think that at scale things slow down and i'm sure you felt it already but somehow you have this core of people that like are exempt how i think we hire and we work with really really good people and that's a very important part of it and empowering them but also spending a lot of time maybe us in the trenches matter a lot also

yeah the other thing we kind of encourage a lot is instead of building to boil the ocean for everything let's figure out how do we do it incrementally how do we do it very quickly like many of our products they're built in the span of weeks and then we go to hey like usually my first question to whoever team is building is who's the target customer who are you working with are you on a first name basis with them are you texting with them

I think having that very tight loop.

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