Imagine a world drowning—not in water, but in data. A relentless flood of information, pouring in from IoT devices, enterprise systems, sprawling data lakes. And in this world, the tools we use to navigate—dashboards, tables, static reports—are brittle rafts, barely keeping us afloat.

Now, imagine something different. A system not of numbers and charts, but of landscapes. A way of seeing, navigating, zooming—not unlike the way we explore the world itself.

Dr. Michael Stonebraker doesn’t just imagine this world. He’s building it.

Michael has spent a lifetime shaping how we think about data. A Turing Award-winning computer scientist, he helped define the very foundations of modern databases. But today, he’s here to talk about something else: a fundamental shift in how we access and visualize information.

In this episode, Pete Wright sits down with Mike to explore Hopara—the tool that might just change how we see data forever. They talk about factories in Brazil, the hidden language of vibration sensors, and why Google Maps might hold the secret to understanding a chaotic world. They discuss the peculiar habits of EKG machines, the logistical ballet of John Deere combines, and why hospitals can be some of the slowest adopters of life-saving technology. And they confront the elephant in the server room: the real reason data remains such an untamed beast in the enterprise.

If you think data visualization is about prettier charts, think again. This is about something much bigger.

Links & Notes

• Hopara.io
• Dr. Michael Stonebraker’s Work