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Reposted by John Kutay

Clare Liguori @clare.dev · Jul 17

Fun conversation with @jkxosound.com about where I think things are going in the AI agents space, Strands Agents, and rats 🐀

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Jul 17

@clare.dev is one of the leaders making AI engineering simple and scalable at AWS. Had a great time chatting with her as we discussed Strands Agents and patterns like “Retrieval as a Tool”.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Jul 17

youtu.be/mDFuNhehIOc?...

Retrieval as a Tool, Not a Destination – with Clare from AWS

YouTube video by Striim

youtu.be

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Jul 17

Link to the full episode:

open.spotify.com/episode/79PK...

Strands Agents: A Model-Driven Approach to AI Agents with Clare Liguori (Senior Principal Engineer at AWS)

What's New In Data · Episode

open.spotify.com

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Jul 17

@clare.dev is one of the leaders making AI engineering simple and scalable at AWS. Had a great time chatting with her as we discussed Strands Agents and patterns like “Retrieval as a Tool”.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Jul 14

hex.tech/blog/im-sorr...

I'm sorry, but those are vanity evals | Hex

Using GPT-4.1 as a case study of our framework for impactful LLM evaluation

hex.tech

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Jul 13

Really appreciate the depth at which the Hex team broke down their Text-to-SQL implementation. Everyone's trying to teach LLMs SQL like it's a training problem but it's really a graph traversal problem.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Apr 2

medium.com/striim/beyon...

Beyond Materialized Views: Using DuckDB for In-Process Columnar Caching

In this post we will talk about using DuckDB as the operational analytics store for the control plane of Striim Developer — a serverless…

medium.com

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Apr 2

In my post about #DuckDB I digress into the role of the database buffer cache to discuss how we segregate transactional workloads from analytical. DuckDB turned out to be a natural, lightweight approach to offloading analytical queries ensuring our application upheld performance requirements.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Apr 2

Instead of materialized views, we built in-process DuckDB caching in the control plane of Striim Developer — improving query performance 5–10x with zero added infra.

PostgreSQL for OLTP, DuckDB for Operational OLAP. But I won't call it HTAP 🤐

medium.com/striim/beyon...

Beyond Materialized Views: Using DuckDB for In-Process Columnar Caching

In this post we will talk about using DuckDB as the operational analytics store for the control plane of Striim Developer — a serverless…

medium.com

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Mar 26

@marcbrooker.bsky.social breaks down how they've architected a fully ACID-compliant database service that combines simple, serverless management with high availability and massive scale on AWS Aurora DSQL.

youtube.com/shorts/dScUi...

Distributed PostgreSQL with Aurora DSQL

YouTube video by Striim

youtube.com

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Mar 26

Thanks Marc! Super fun to learn how you combined the best parts of PostgreSQL and your own distributed processing engine.

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Mar 19

This was actually my longest podcast ever at over 70 minutes. Not sure I could have made it any shorter because nerding out on databases with Andy Pavlo was too fun.

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Mar 18

Was super fun chatting with @andypavlo.bsky.social
to kick off the new season of What's New in Data. We dive into vector databases, text to sql, trends in data infrastructure, and Andy's awesome (and open) database course.

youtube.com/shorts/tjLmx...

Andy Pavlo on Vector Databases

YouTube video by Striim

youtube.com

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Mar 18

Was super fun chatting with @andypavlo.bsky.social
to kick off the new season of What's New in Data. We dive into vector databases, text to sql, trends in data infrastructure, and Andy's awesome (and open) database course.

youtube.com/shorts/tjLmx...

Andy Pavlo on Vector Databases

YouTube video by Striim

youtube.com

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 26

A side effect of LLMs: I'm taking on way more than I ever have in my life. I don't know if this is more productive or diluting myself. tbd!

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 25

Just found out one of the internal b2b CRUD app vendors is more like CRD because it doesn't support updating submissions. AI gonna cook that sector so hard.

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 22

and that’s why I’m working on a Saturday morning 🫠

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 17

Your adversaries are taking (not my) Presidents Day off. Time to ship. 🚀

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 17

I’ll never forget where I was the day I learned oats could be milked.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 14

Them: Wait so you're saying I don't need to deploy Kafka?
Me: No
Them: Kinesis?
Me: No
Them: Zookeeper? YARN?
Me: No
Them: Will you write every record to disk and replicate it?
Me: No

Unfortunately the bar of complexity for streaming has been set so high. I'm calling it Streamholm Syndrome.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 14

I'm not sure whether to be more amazed at the hate for FiveTran's price increase or the fact that Reddit doesn't know Striim exists and are proposing batch solutions to this persons obvious streaming CDC use case.

www.reddit.com/r/dataengine...

I am trying to escape the Fivetran price increase

www.reddit.com

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 14

They really gave the smell of rain an epic name: petrichor. They really did that.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 13

If you don't have that type of scale, but simply want a reliable, real-time streaming service, you can use Striim Developer for free 🤘
signup-developer.striim.com

Sign Up - Striim Developer

signup-developer.striim.com

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 13

A single Striim cluster (multi-node for scalability and fault tolernace) can handle 35k, very wide, very active databases that produce millions of DML per hour hour and dozens of DDL per day. The 'intelligence' layer or Striim was able to apply rule based logic on how to handle complex DDL.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 12

I will die on this hill but MySQL's 'Alter Table Add Column AFTER' DDL is pointless. It doesn't change the layout on disk. If you care about order of the columns, that's purely a read side construct and you should address it in your query not your DDL!

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · Feb 12

We’ve shifted embedding generation and transformers left into the streaming layer to support near real-time RAG. Take a read if you want to hear the optimizations we made for change data capture and incremental embedding generation.

www.striim.com/blog/real-ti...

Real-Time RAG: Streaming Vector Embeddings and Low-Latency AI Search

Imagine searching for products on an online store by simply typing “best eco-friendly toys for toddlers under $50” and getting instant, accurate results—while the inventory is synchronized seamlessly ...

www.striim.com

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