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Technical Author & Data Engineer
Simon is a Data Engineer and Technical Author with 20+ years of experience in the data field. He's the author of the Data Engineering Blog (ssp.sh), curator of the Data Engineering Vault (vault.ssp.sh), and currently writes a book about Data Engineering Design Patterns (dedp.online). Simon maintains an awareness of open-source data engineering technologies and enjoys sharing his knowledge with the community.
Oct 9, 2026 · Simon Späti
Josh Wills, creator of dbt-duckdb and former head of data engineering at Slack, on why the model barely matters, why agents still write ugly and expensive data pipelines, and why data engineering is still the cache invalidation problem.
Sep 16, 2026 · Simon Späti
The September 2026 DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter: DuckLabs joins AWS and MotherDuck acquires Tower, DuckDB v2.0-alpha lands, table functions in pure Java, bulk loads into SQL Server, Zarr stores as SQL tables, an infinite canvas for your data, plus a community spotlight on Vladimir Gribanov.
Sep 2, 2026 · Simon Späti
A primer on the context layer, semantic layer, and ontology: what each term means, how they fit together, and why AI agents still need a human to decide what's true.
Aug 13, 2026 · Simon Späti
The August 2026 DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter: giving every agent its own embedded DuckDB, the ADBC extension reaching 30+ external databases, async I/O landing in v2.0, ISO GQL graph queries, Perspective 5.0 pushdown, plus a community spotlight on Kyle Cheung.
Jul 31, 2026 · Simon Späti
Maxime Beauchemin, creator of Airflow and Superset, shares how he uses AI agents for data engineering: orchestrating agents on a shared canvas with Agor, context layers and semantics, Okta for Agents security, and automating CEO work with AI assistants.
Jul 15, 2026 · Simon Späti
July's DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter: a portable R2 + DuckLake analytics stack, why PostHog rebuilt on DuckDB over ClickHouse, DuckCon #7 and the 1.5.4 / 1.4.5 releases, a SedonaDB WASM build for spatial SQL in the browser, and more.
Jun 12, 2026 · Simon Späti
The June 2026 DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter: a local-first ETL/ELT studio, the Quack client-server protocol and its OAuth layer, DuckLake inlining, DuckDB internals, MotherDuck Flights for agent-native ingest, plus a community spotlight on Ryan Dolley.
Jun 5, 2026 · Simon Späti
Wes McKinney, creator of pandas and co-creator of Apache Arrow, shares how he works with AI coding agents: spec-driven workflows with superpowers, continuous AI code review with Roborev, token economics, and why vibe coding is dangerous but agentic engineering isn't.
May 21, 2026 · Simon Späti
Chris Riccomini on using AI for data engineering: correctness in financial data, why LLMs should speak Substrait over SQL, the Ralph Loop for context management, security with 'Okta for Agents', and the future of the data engineer role.
May 11, 2026 · Simon Späti
DuckDB Monthly #41: Torsten's 15-week DuckDB internals course, Pete's full-text search walkthrough on a multi-GB email corpus, Mark's GCAT satellite pipeline with H3, plus column-level lineage with duck_lineage and DuckLake v1.0.
Apr 24, 2026 · Simon Späti
25 years of external tables, from Oracle 9i to DuckLake. When to use internal storage vs. external tables, why they keep getting re-added to every major data warehouse, and a benchmark showing the speed tax for cold data.
Apr 17, 2026 · Simon Späti
DuckLake 1.0 ships, Lance adds vector search, Rust-native extension
Mar 27, 2026 · Simon Späti
Mark Freeman, Head of DevRel at Gable, shares his Spec-Driven Development workflow for producing high-quality, reproducible AI outcomes using Claude Code, ExcaliDraw diagrams, JSON schemas, and agent teams with tmux.
Mar 13, 2026 · Simon Späti
SQL Transpilers, VS Code Extensions, Dives and more
Feb 24, 2026 · Simon Späti
Comparing Git-like Tools That Separate Metadata from Data
Feb 11, 2026 · Simon Späti
MSSQL Extension, Vortex File Format & 2TB Memory Benchmarks
Feb 5, 2026 · Simon Späti
Build a local-first RAG for your Obsidian notes using DuckDB's vector search, then deploy it as a serverless web app with MotherDuck
Jan 17, 2026 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: Iceberg extension adds full DML (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE). Process 1TB in 30 seconds. Query data via AI agents with MCP server. TypeScript macros for APIs.
Dec 10, 2025 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: v1.4 adds AES-256 encryption. DuckLake brings ACID-compliant lakehouse with time-travel queries. Gaggle extension queries Kaggle datasets directly via SQL.
Dec 3, 2025 · Simon Späti
Speed up slow dashboards without adding new infrastructure. Learn how DuckDB's caching extensions can drop query times from minutes to seconds.
Nov 24, 2025 · Simon Späti
This article explores how to bring Git style workflows like branching, testing, and deploying to your data stack. Learn how concepts like zero copy cloning and metadata pointers can finally give you isolated test environments.
Nov 12, 2025 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: QuackStore caching cuts query time from 49s to 3s. Infera runs ONNX ML models in SQL. 127 community extensions analyzed. DuckLake architecture explained.
Oct 30, 2025 · Simon Späti
A great panel answering the most voted/commented data questions on Reddit
Oct 7, 2025 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: v1.4.0 LTS brings AES-256 encryption, MERGE statements, and Iceberg writes. 100x faster than Spark on local Parquet. Official Docker images released.
Sep 9, 2025 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: Spatial joins 58x faster via R-tree indexing. pg_duckdb 1.0 adds OLAP analytics to PostgreSQL. One team cut Snowflake costs 79% using DuckDB caching.
Aug 19, 2025 · Simon Späti
Learn what a semantic layer is, why it matters, and how to build a simple one with DuckDB and Ibis using just YAML and Python
Aug 7, 2025 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: 50.7% YoY developer growth. DuckLake v0.2 adds credential secrets. BigQuery extension hits 21.7k weekly downloads. Vector search enables RAG applications.
Jul 21, 2025 · Simon Späti
A comprehensive 3-week structured roadmap for learning data engineering fundamentals, from SQL and Git basics to advanced topics like streaming, data quality, and DevOps.RetryClaude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
Jul 8, 2025 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: Tributary streams Kafka data to SQL queries. SQLRooms enables browser analytics via DuckDB-WASM. pg_duckdb benchmarks show 1,500x TPC-DS speedup.
Jul 3, 2025 · Simon Späti
Explore the top data engineering tools and platforms of 2026. This guide details the essential DevOps tools, CI/CD practices, and infrastructure needed to build a modern, scalable data platform.
Jun 6, 2025 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: DuckLake combines catalog and table format with ACID metadata in SQL. Radio extension adds WebSocket and Redis Pub/Sub. Top CSV benchmark results.
May 23, 2025 · Simon Späti
Learn how DuckDB and open table formats like Iceberg power a fast, composable analytics stack on affordable cloud storage
May 8, 2025 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: Metabase driver queries Parquet files directly. FlockMTL integrates LLMs into SQL workflows. Doom clone runs in DuckDB-WASM. Spatial wins top honors.
Apr 18, 2025 · Simon Späti
How to Query JSON and Log Files with SQL Using DuckDB and MotherDuck
Apr 5, 2025 · Simon Späti
DuckDB news: Streaming support with new remote file caching. Community extensions expand real-time analytics. Event-driven processing patterns for data pipelines.
Mar 28, 2025 · Simon Späti
Understand when to use a vector database and how it differs from vector search engines.
