MLOps community meetup #52! Last Wednesday we talked to Luke Feeney and Gavin Mendel-Gleason, TerminusDB.

// Abstract:
A look at the open-source 'Git for Data' landscape with a focus on how the various tools fit into the pipeline. Following that scene-setting, we will delve into how and why TerminusDB builds a revision control database from the ground up.

// Takeaways
- Understanding the 'git for data' offering and landscape
- See how to technically approach a revision control database implementation
- Dream of a better tomorrow

// Bio:

Luke Feeney
Operations Lead, TerminusDB  

Luke Feeney is Operations Director at TerminusDB. Prior to joining TerminusDB, Luke worked in the Irish Foreign Ministry for a number of years. He served in Ireland’s Permanent Mission to the UN in New York and the Embassies in South Africa and Greece. He was Ireland’s acting Ambassador to Greece for 2016 and 2017. Luke was also the Head of the Government of Ireland’s Brexit Communications Team and the Government Brexit Spokesperson from 2017 to 2018.

Gavin Mendel-Gleason
Chief Technology Officer, TerminusDB  

Dr Gavin Mendel-Gleason is CTO of TerminusDB. He is a former research fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the School of Statistics and Computer Science. His research focuses on databases, logic and verification in software engineering. His work includes contributing to the Seshat global historical databank, an ambitious project to record and analyse patterns in human history. He is the inventor of the Web Object Query Language and the primary architect of TerminusDB. He is interested in improving the best practices of the software development community and a strong believer in formal methods and the use of mathematics and logic as disciplines to increase the quality and robustness of software.

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Join our Slack community:  https://go.mlops.community/slack
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Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/
Connect with Luke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-feeney/
Connect with Gavin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavinmendelgleason/

Timestamps:
[00:00] MLOps Announcements
[00:17] Slack Community
[00:59] Luke and Gavin's Presentation Style
[01:34] MLOps Community Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube
[01:45] Introduction to Luke Feeney and Gavin Mendel-Gleason
[04:35] Luke: You wanted Git for Data?
[05:17] Deep Breath || Is there a Git for Data?
[06:30] What is Git for Data?
[08:55] Four Big Buckets
[28:43] Jupiter Notebook
[30:20] Gavin: Collaboration for Structured Data
[31:28] What about gitdifs with gitlfs?
[31:40] Outline: Motivation, Challenges, Solution
[35:35] Motivation: Why Structured Data?
[36:08] Data is Core
[37:34] Challenges: Data is Still in the Dark Ages
[37:40] Structured or Unstructured, we're doing it wrong
[40:15] Managing Data means Collaborating
[45:09] Discoverability and Schema: Structured data requires a real database - not just GIT.
[46:27] Revision Control
[47:00] Collaboration
[48:38] "Git for data, data is the new oil."
[49:01] Why merging is so difficult?
[49:25] "If you have a schema, you can do much more intelligent things."
[52:36] Machine Learning and Revision Control