It's About Data

 

It’s About Data — A Podcast from dbInsight & Halfpipe Systems

New insights, expert conversations from the world of data and analytics.

► SUBSCRIBE HERE

It’s About Data is the topical straight talking podcast about data, AI, analytics “and whatever else we feel like talking about.”

With episodes running 15 - 20 minutes, we get straight to the point. Reformed data scientist Matt Housley and veteran industry analyst Tony Baer – often joined by guests from the data community – deliver their takes on current ideas, trends, vendor strategies, and technology developments impacting the data world. Episodes range from the topical (The “Snowbricks” rivalry between Databricks and Snowflake) to the strategic (the implications of MCP for agentic AI).

Regularly scheduled episodes debut on YouTube, LinkedIn and Spotify every Wednesday at noon ET, but we also interrupt this program to broadcast special episodes when major headlines break.

Watch the latest episode: August 27, 2025

What's the purpose of a Data Team in 2025?

Ollie Hughes (CEO of ‪@counthq‬ ) joins Tony and Matt for episode 20. How can #data teams rise above the noise? How will data roles evolve if basic technical tasks are automated?
#dataanalytics #artificialintelligence

Podcast Archive

🎙️ Ep 19: ‪Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents, with Jessica Talisman
August 6, 2025
Jessica Talisman joins Tony and Matt to discuss the current limitations of AI systems, and finding solutions in knowledge infrastructure and knowledge engineering.
#artificialintelligence #knowledgegraphs #ontology

🎙️ Ep 18: ‪AI, #ai Everywhere (#aws Summit 2025 NYC )
July 23, 2025
Tony gets a blast of AI related news at AWS Summit 2025 NYC.
#modelcontextprotocol #aiagents #vectordatabase

🎙️ Ep 17: ‪@NVIDIA‬ Shatters the Market Cap Record
July 16, 2025
Nvidia just hit a record market capitalization of $4.2 trillion.
We interrupt our summer lull to give our hot take. #nvidia #generativeai #deeplearning

🎙️ Ep 16: Oracle Database@AWS
July 9, 2025
We're joined by guests Mehul Shah and Kambiz Aghili to discuss Oracle Database@AWS.
What do broadening multi-cloud partnerships mean for customers and cloud architects?

🎙️Ep 15: Major Themes of 2025 H1
July 2, 2025
Tony and Matt follow up the previous episode's review of first half announcements with a discussion of major themes for the year to date.
Acquisitions, rebundling the modern data stack, data products, interop and the future of engineers in an #artificialintelligence driven industry.

🎙️Ep 14: Data News Recap — H1 2025
June 25, 2025
Tony and Matt review vendor news from the first half of 2025.
In short: agents, agents, agents. #aiagents #enterpriseai #cloudcomputing #datawarehousing

🎙️Ep 13: Data + AI Summit 2025
June 18, 2025
Matt and Tony discuss the 2025 edition of ⁠ @Databricks⁠' annual shindig in San Francisco.
#postgres #iceberg @snowflakeinc #airealism

🎙️Ep 12: DuckLake (with Ryan Boyd)
June 11, 2025
Ryan (cofounder @motherduckdb) joins Tony and Matt to discuss the recent release of DuckLake, a combined table format and data catalog released by the ‪@duckdb‬ foundation.
#datawarehouse #dataanalytics #iceberg #duckdb #podcast

🎙️Episode 11: Snowflake Summit 2025
June 6, 2025
We discuss this year's Snowflake Summit. Agents, Iceberg, Postgres and Snowflake's ongoing battle with old rival Databricks.

🎙️Episode 10: Apache Iceberg and Composable data Stacks (with Alex Merced)
June 4, 2025
Alex Merced joins Tony and Matt to discuss Apache Iceberg and the future of composable data stacks.
Alex is the head of DevRel at Dremio and a coauthor of the O'Reilly Media book Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide.

🎙️Ep 9: Salesforce buys Informatica (with Ryan Dolley)
June 8, 2025
In this episode, Matt and Tony are joined by Ryan Dolley of GoodData to discuss Salesforce's acquisition of Informatica.

🎙️Episode 8: SAP Sapphire 2025
May 28, 2025
We discuss their takeaways from SAP Sapphire 2025. Topics include SAP Business Data Cloud, the challenges of culture, the last 10% problem for AI, and conservatism versus modernization.

🎙️Episode 7: Model Context Protocol
May 21, 2025
We discuss #modelcontextprotocol, an open framework developed by  that allows AI models and #aiagents to access data. Will MCP continue to run away from the competition?

🎙️Episode 6: IBM Think 2025
May 14, 2025
We recap IBM Think 2025. IBM as a software company, AI on mainframes and the challenges of supporting legacy applications while looking toward the future

🎙️Episode 5: Small Models are the key to AI Success (with Vin Vashista)
May 7, 2025
Special guest Vin Vashishta talks about the power of small language models for agentic AI workflows.

🎙️Episode 4: Oracle’s Multicloud Strategy (with Sanjeev Mohan)
April 30, 2025
We are joined by Sanjeev Mohan to discuss Oracle's multicloud partnership strategy.

🎙️Episode 3: Google Cloud NEXT 2025
April 16, 2025
We discuss a whole slew of announcements from Google Cloud Next 2025.

🎙️Episode 2: CoreWeave IPO (with Juan Sequeda)
April 10, 2025

We are joined by Juan Sequeda to discuss the CoreWeave IPO and its implications. Here is the article that Tony referenced in the episode:
https://siliconangle.com/2024/02/26/giant-sucking-sound-generative-ai/ 

🎙️Episode 1: SAP Databricks
March 24, 2025
We discuss the SAP/Databricks partnership and its aftermath.