iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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 · 22/02/2025

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

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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 · 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

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

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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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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 · 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 · 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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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 20/01/2025

Shortly after evacuating, I caught a video of the turmoil hoping to see the firefighting planes rescue the neighborhood. They worked hard but sadly the elements were too strong.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 17/01/2025

It's high praise when a CDO says your product is 'the only tool' that could solve both their technical and business problems. Striim's clustered, fully managed CDC + streaming service gave data teams the real-time data they needed to ensure better shelf inventory for shoppers in stores.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 17/01/2025

One of the thornier problems we’ve solved in Striim CDC is implementing off-heap buffering to optimize performance while ensuring transaction consistency during replication. This approach avoids GC overhead, maintains isolation, and interleaves commits smoothly for accurate replication.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 17/01/2025

New year, new office. We're excited to move into Facebook's OG HQ in Downtown Palo Alto for a fun year of Change Data Capture, Data Streaming and continuing to partner with the enterprise operators modernizing their critical infrastructure.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 10/01/2025

I was luckily home instead of Palo Alto for work this week. My wife called me outside, and I saw the fire with hot winds roaring down at us. We packed what we could in 10 minutes, mostly for the baby and dog, messaged neighbors. I knew that fire would tear through our town as soon as I saw it.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 06/01/2025

Looks like season 7 will have a lofi intro song! Gives me a good reason to dust off my midi keyboard.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 06/01/2025

“Streaming is complicated” or “real time is expensive” are popular opinions in data but unfortunately it’s a side effect of trying to build pipelines w/ OSS tools. Striim gives you a point and click, serverless architecture for streaming in part b/c we have no dependency on the above.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 05/01/2025

Clover point of sale systems are widening their lead over Square in market share. On a separate note, Clover uses Striim for real-time reporting in Snowflake. Will be writing up a case study about their architecture and why they choose streaming CDC with Striim.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 04/01/2025

For anyone who thinks I’m joking…I asked again and it gave me a more detailed version of the same conference poachers!

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 03/01/2025

I asked Grok to draw what it thinks my enemies look like. Very accurate they're all wearing conference badges and probably want to ask me 20 obtuse questions about how to build their own competing Change Data Capture and/or streaming product.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 03/01/2025

Here is the data infrastructure behind Striim Developer. It was pretty remarkable to see how DuckDB made analytics-driven operational workloads much more performant and easier to develop. DuckDB lives exclusively in the operational plane codebase with no external infra or storage.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 02/01/2025

At the start of each year, I gift my team a book of their choice spanning technical, philosophical, and broader self-help topics. While learning on the job may require niche knowledge, I generally see it's helpful to review first principles and foundations with timeless books on these topics.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 29/12/2024

Can't believe we're going into season 7 of What's New in Data! What started as a fun side project has snowballed into something meaningful.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 27/12/2024

When you use Striim's Automated Pipelines, you'll see that we create two pipelines for you: one for schema creation and initial load, and another from CDC and schema evolution. While the complexity of setup is abstracted from you, you still have granular control over each pipeline if needed.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 27/12/2024

Why streaming with Striim is great for ELT: * You don't have to know anything about Kafka * Real-time data is the standard * Automatic alerts on lagging data * You don't have to resync on every failure, use the magic checkpointing of CDC and streaming to resume from the latest event

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 26/12/2024

In Striim you'll see this 'chill guy', prompting you to create your first 'Vector Embeddings Generator'. Using your OpenAI or VertexAI key, it'll generate embeddings for vector databases such as PostgreSQL. As always, you can try this feature for free in Striim Developer. AI API rates may apply.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 25/12/2024

The power and efficiency of data streaming with the simplicity of ELT. Check out Striim’s Automated Pipelines in our serverless free tier.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 24/12/2024

Want to try Striim's fully automated Stripe Reader? 1. signup-developer.striim.com 2. Navigate the template in the UI or simply go here: developer.striim.com#/create-app?...

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 24/12/2024

Dogfooding your products is always a nice exercise. It's an especially nice experience when its a streaming platform with over 100 connectors. We've made our serverless free tier available for up to 1 billion events per month. I'll be writing about how we're able to offer that shortly...

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 22/12/2024

Announcing Striim's new 'External Sources', interoperable with Debezium and Avro compliant Kafka records. Now any Debezium CDC connector can natively integrate with Striim: * Automated initial load, schema conversion, CDC cutover * Schema evolution * Exactly once processing semantics supported

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 20/12/2024

Bittersweet saying bye to our original office, looking forward to the new spot on University Avenue! Hope to host a few live 'What's New in Data' and hackathon events in the new year.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 17/12/2024

Very cool to see movement (no pun intended) in the CDC space! Always happy to see companies find a good home for their product. Curious, did anyone here use Rivery for CDC? I honestly hadn't come across it in the wild before.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 13/12/2024

You can use Striim Developer to build fully automated, high performance CDC pipelines powered by data streaming. The service is free for up to 1 billion events per month. Try it out here: signup-developer.striim.com

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 12/12/2024

Streaming might be hard. Striiming is easy and we made it free for up to 1 billion events/month in our serverless free tier: Striim Developer. This includes access to our CDC connectors, streaming connectors, and you can trial our premium application adapters in the same service.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 12/12/2024

I can't even start! : )

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 11/12/2024

After years of dedication to Streaming CDC, reaching this milestone is incredibly rewarding. Collaborating with the GM for all SQLServer products at Microsoft to bring our simple, high-performance SQL Server CDC solution to market is a proud moment for our team!

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 09/12/2024

The alleged murderer of UHC CEO was a DATA ENGINEER? A lot to unpack here.

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John Kutay @jkxosound.com · 06/12/2024

Please passive aggressively comment for inclusion on my complete and unbiased new 'Data Landscape'.

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