iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by John Kutay

Clare Liguori @clare.dev · 17/07/2025

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

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 17/07/2025

@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 · 14/07/2025

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 · 03/04/2025

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 · 02/04/2025

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...

medium.com

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…

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 26/03/2025

@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...

youtube.com

Distributed PostgreSQL with Aurora DSQL

YouTube video by Striim

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 19/03/2025

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.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 18/03/2025

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...

youtube.com

Andy Pavlo on Vector Databases

YouTube video by Striim

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 26/02/2025

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!

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 25/02/2025

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.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 22/02/2025

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

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 17/02/2025

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

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 17/02/2025

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

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 14/02/2025

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 · 14/02/2025

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...

reddit.com

I am trying to escape the Fivetran price increase

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 14/02/2025

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

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 13/02/2025

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 · 12/02/2025

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 · 12/02/2025

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...

striim.com

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 ...

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 08/02/2025

Driving from SF to LA talking to ChatGPT about Kafka. I think that’s how schizo starts.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 08/02/2025

I always love seeing clovers in the wild! Knowing every transaction is streamed to Snowflake in real time with Striim’s streaming CDC service. We do a lot of work to ensure transactions are bound reliably and replicated with no duplicates while maintaining low latency.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 05/02/2025

youtu.be/9YSU-M0m1Jk?... When I saw the fire up the hill, I knew we wouldn't have much time to get out before the only escape road would become gridlocked. I texted my friends up on Lachman Ln an hour before they got an alert from the city to leave.

m.youtube.com

Escape from the Palisades: Split-second decision making, confusing responses

YouTube video by Los Angeles Times

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 05/02/2025

It's 2025 why am I still explaining federation vs code conversion vs replication.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 05/02/2025

As someone taking inventory of receipts of everything I ever owned, I regret every single purchase I didn't make online because its so hard to find the receipt.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 05/02/2025

I should be charging for this type of life coaching on LinkedIn.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 31/01/2025

I was really surprised to hear a data team ask me how replication will impact their database and had legit concerns. Database providers need to do a better job making sure their developers have confidence deploying for HA.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 31/01/2025

MAGA narrative has infiltrated the Palisades fire. The truth is there was lots of low and mixed income apartments along Sunset in my area (Marquez) and near the high school. Those residents deserve to come back home too. Some had been there for decades.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 31/01/2025

This gives me hope I’ll find all that data conference swag I never wore 🤞🏼

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 31/01/2025

Transaction logs and their respective interfaces are a bit of a complicated topic and SQLServer has some unique challenges. I'd say its quite different from Oracle's redo log and how OSS databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL approach logical replication. We worked on making the first in-memory log...

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Reposted by John Kutay

John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 30/01/2025

“The executives want a report on why so many customers churned last quarter but I told them they need to wait for me to build an interoperable data lake using an open table format like Netflix did (we’re a 50 person startup).”

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 30/01/2025

Whoever leaked this story definitely wants Databricks to bid 2x on Redpanda 😂

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 30/01/2025

After a year of record breaking growth for Striim, it was great to celebrate our wins and plan for the future. We defied gravity, solved problems that companies 1000x our size couldn't solve, won 20% of the Fortune 100 and 4 of the Fortune 10. Here's to a great 2025. Data Streaming 🚀

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 30/01/2025

My neighbor Chuck always went all out making Halloween a spectacle on our block. Seeing him on the news was heartbreaking but equally inspiring. If he’s rebuilding, we know the neighborhood is coming back better than ever.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 29/01/2025

SQLServer’s approach to logging is great for recovery and homogenous replication but lacks mature layers of abstraction. Without a direct interface to logs, SQL Server relies on undocumented functions or CDC tables (which adds overhead). We've solved the latter with our SQL2Fabric solution.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 29/01/2025

An unspoken requirement of data engineering is looking at raw, ambiguous data and figuring out how to turn it into accurate business insights. Hiding in infrastructure development to isolate yourself from business meaning is counterproductive.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 28/01/2025

2000s pop production was a cultural peak. For instance Janet Jackson’s “Someone to Call My Lover” is a prime example of super producers, sampling Satie’s Gymnopédie so subtly that the average pop listener doesn’t notice the classical influence. open.spotify.com/track/43zr9k...

open.spotify.com

Someone To Call My Lover

Janet Jackson · All For You · Song · 2001

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 28/01/2025

We'll find out that the hidden, undisclosed costs of training DeepSeek were closer to $1b/year soon enough. Anyways, good opportunity for the laggards to buy NVIDIA shares.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 28/01/2025

I was reading Steinbeck's “Of Mice and Men” in a guest room offered to us by generous strangers. The foreword described families leaving the Dust Bowl, leaving clouds of dust behind, looking for a better life in California with only what they could carry. Hmmm...anyways where should we move to? 😂

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 28/01/2025

Playing tennis and my opponent hits an amazing shot Me: wtf how did they do that? This will be a tough match. Them: wtf how did I do that? Going to need more luck to win this match.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 28/01/2025

Striim Developer gives you a free, serverless option to build real-time pipelines. It includes our Automated Pipelines (automated data movement with streaming ingest) for BigQuery, Snowflake, and Databricks, our Streaming SQL processor, and application connectors. striim.com/docs/en/stri...

striim.com

Striim Developer

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 26/01/2025

Our local K-5 Marquez School was partially destroyed by the palisades fire. Hope to see it back better than ever one day!

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 25/01/2025

I don’t understand car washes that are closed on sundays. Who has the time to get their car washed M-F 9-5?

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 25/01/2025

yeah classic bay area. just as bad as the smoothie spot at my gym closing at 6 pm...despite the LA/NYC branches of the same business being open until 10 pm.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 23/01/2025

Resiliency and data correctness relies on granular checkpointing. In Striim, we handle this for you automatically and make it easily observable in the console.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 23/01/2025

In Striim Developer, you can set up fully automated, real-time streaming replication pipelines from your database to your other databases with transactional consistency, or your favorite data warehouse with streaming, near real time ingest. signup-developer.striim.com

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 22/01/2025

Cutting 3.5% of your workforce while simultaneously 'not slowing down hiring' is a helluva drug. Heart goes out to any of you impacted by this.

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