E11: Streaming Data w/ Eric Sammer

In this episode, I interview Eric Sammer, the founder & CEO of Decodable. Eric was previously an engineering manager at Cloudera, and before that the founder of Rocana, an early observability company that was sold to Splunk. Eric has an amazing perspective on the architecture of data systems based on his years of experience in the field. We chat about his thoughts on the opportunities and challenges specifically around streaming data. Highlights:[1:45] - Eric's start in ad-tech, which led him into the high-volume data world plus his experiences at Cloudera working on Avro, Parquet & Impala - an alternative to Hive & Presto[4:45] - Eric's opportunistic path to starting a company as an engineer[7:15] - Lessons learned while building his first company, Rocana, which was sold to Splunk in 2017, plus insights on the right way to find product-market fit [10:50] - Eric's thoughts on why the time for streaming is now and how the use cases have surpassed fraud, waste and abuse + his tech stack of choice (Debezium, Kafka & Flink)[14:55] - How streaming fits in the operational data landscape (OLTP)[17:10] - Eric's thoughts on the value in streaming analytics (OLAP) and how ML models might get bigger benefits from streaming than dashboards do[22:20] - Preview of the Streaming Data track @ Data Council Austin '23 where Eric is the track host-- Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world. Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

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