The database for all your AI needs

Database School

Content provided by Aaron Francis and Try Hard Studios. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Aaron Francis and Try Hard Studios or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

3M ago 1:00:07

MP3•Episode home

Marcel Kornacker, the creator of Apache Impala and co-creator of Apache Parquet, joins me to talk about his latest project: Pixeltable, a multimodal AI database that combines structured and unstructured data with rich, Python-native workflows.

From ingestion to vector search, transcription to snapshots, Pixeltable eliminates painful data plumbing for modern AI teams.

Follow Marcel

Pixeltable: https://pixeltable.com
Pixeltable GitHub: https://github.com/pixeltable/pixeltable
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelkornacker

Follow Aaron

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis
Website: https://aaronfrancis.com – find articles, podcasts, courses, and more
Database School: https://databaseschool.com

Chapters

0:00 – Introduction
0:20 – Meet Marcel Kornacker
1:19 – Early career and grad school in databases
2:12 – Joining Google and building F1
3:42 – How F1 used Spanner at Google
4:01 – Starting Apache Impala at Cloudera
6:02 – Why SQL still matters
7:29 – What keeps Marcel fascinated with databases
9:37 – The “SQL is dead” waves and shift to AI
10:21 – Observing pain points in computer vision pipelines
13:02 – Multimodal data challenges and the idea for Pixeltable
16:10 – How Pixeltable handles transformations with computed columns
26:29 – Example: processing video, audio, and transcripts in Pixeltable
33:12 – DAG execution and parallelism explained
37:00 – Transactional guarantees in Pixeltable
39:00 – Iterators and chunking data for search
42:26 – Using embeddings and semantic search
47:05 – Updating data and incremental recomputation
50:06 – Thoughts on RAG and hybrid search
53:14 – Real-world use cases and dataset curation
57:00 – Example: labeling food waste on cruise ships
1:02:00 – Labeling workflows and syncing annotations
1:02:41 – Pixeltable’s roadmap and cloud vision
1:07:10 – How to get involved with Pixeltable
1:09:03 – Closing and where to find Marcel

28 episodes

#Tech #Aaron Francis #Try Hard Studios #Podcasting Education #Database #Programming #Technology #Software Development