 It's theCUBE, covering the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020, brought to you by Vertica. Hi everybody, welcome to this digital coverage of the Vertica Big Data Conference. You're watching theCUBE and my name is Dave Vellante. It's my pleasure to invite in Ben White, who's a senior database engineer at Domo. Ben, great to see you, man, thanks for coming on. Great to be here and here. You know, as I said earlier when we were off camera, I really was hoping I could meet you face to face in Boston this year, but hey, I'll take it. And our community really wants to hear from experts like yourself, but let's start with Domo as the company, share with us what Domo does and what your role is there. Well, if I can go straight to the official, what Domo does is we provide, we process data at BI scale. We provide BI leverage at cloud scale in record time. And so what that means is, you know, we are a business operating system where we provide a number of analytical abilities to companies of all sizes, but we do that at cloud scale. And so I think that differentiates quite a bit. So a lot of your work, if I understand it, and just in terms of understanding what Domo does is there's a lot of pressure in terms of being real time. It's not like, you sometimes don't know what's coming at you. So it's ad hoc. I wonder if you could sort of talk about that, confirm that and maybe add a little color to it. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. That's probably the biggest challenge it is to being, to operate in Domo is that it is an ad hoc environment. And certainly what that means is that you've got analysts and executives that are able to submit their own queries without very, with very few limitations. So from an engineering standpoint, the challenge in that of course is that you don't have this predictable dashboard to plan for when it comes to performance planning. And so it definitely presents some challenges for us that we've done some pretty unique things, I think, to address those, right? So it sounds like your background fits well with that. I understand here. People have called you a database whisperer and an envelope pusher. What does that mean to a DBA in this day and age? The whisperer part is probably a lost art in the sense that it's not really sustainable, right? The idea that whatever it is I'm able to do with the database, it has to be repeatable. And so that's really where analytics comes in, right? And that's where pushing the envelope comes in. And in a lot of ways that's where Vertica comes in with this open architecture. And so as a person who has a reputation for saying, I understand this is what our limitations should be, but I think we can do more having a platform like Vertica with such an open architecture kind of let you push those limits quite a bit. I mean, I've always felt like Vertica, when I first saw the Stonebreaker architecture and talk to some of the early founders, I always felt like it was the Ferrari of databases certainly at the time. And it sounds like you guys use it in that regard. But talk a little bit more about how you use Vertica, why MPP, why Vertica, why can't you do this with our DBMS? Educate us a little bit on sort of the basics. But for us, it was part of what I mentioned when we started, when we talked about the very nature of the Domo platform, where there's an incredible amount of resiliency required. And so Vertica, the MPP platform, of course, allows us to build individual database clusters that can perform best for the workload that might be assigned to them. So the open, the expandable, the ability to grow Vertica, right, as your base goal, those are all important factors when you're choosing early on, right, without a real idea of how rope would be or what it would look like. If you were kind of throwing something into the dark, you looked at the Vertica platform and you could see, well, as I grow, I can kind of deal with this, right? I can do some unique things with the platform in terms of this open architecture that will allow me to not have to make all my decisions today, right, about how I'm going to. So you're using Vertica, I know, at least in part, you're working with AWS as well. Can you describe sort of your environment? Do you have anything on-prem? Is everything in the cloud? What's your setup look like? Sure, we have a hybrid cloud environment where we have a significant presence in public clouds and our own private cloud. And so, yeah, having said that, we certainly have a really an extensive presence, I would say in AWS. And so, they're definitely a good partner of ours when it comes to providing the databases and the server power that we need to operate on. From the standpoint of engineering and architecting a database, what were some of the challenges that you faced when you had to create that hybrid architecture? What did you face and how did you overcome that? Well, you know, some of the, there are some things we faced in terms of, one, it made it easy that Vertica and AWS have their own, obviously, they play well together, we'll say that. And so, Vertica was designed to run on AWS. And so, that part of it took care of itself. Now, our own private cloud and being able to connect that to our public cloud has been a part of our own engineering ability. And again, I don't wanna make little light of it, it's certainly not impossible. And so we've, some of the challenges that were pertaining to the database really were in the early days. And you mentioned, when we talked a little bit earlier about Vertica's most recent EON mode, and I'm sure you'll get to that. But when I think about early challenges, some of the early challenges were the architecture of enterprise mode. When I talk about all of these, this idea that we could have unique databases or database clusters of different sizes or this elasticity, that's really, if you know the enterprise architecture, that's not necessarily the enterprise architecture. So we have to do some unique things, I think, to overcome that early, to get around the rigidness of enterprise. Yeah, I mean, I hear you, right? Enterprise is complex and you like when things are hardened and fossilized, but in your ad hoc environment, that's not what you needed. So talk a more about EON mode. What is EON mode for you and how do you apply it? What are some of the challenges and opportunities there that you found? So the opportunities were certainly in its elastic architecture and the ability to separate and do the storage immediately meant that for some of the unique data paths that we wanted to take, right? We could do that fairly quickly. Certainly we could expand databases, right? Quickly, but more importantly, now you could reduce because previously in the past, right? When I mentioned the enterprise architecture, the idea of growing a database in itself has its pain, right? As far as the time it takes to see the data in that. But to reach to then think about taking that database back down, I know, I know well, all of a sudden with EON, right? You had this elasticity where you could kind of start to think about auto scaling where you go up and down and maybe you could save some money or maybe you could improve performance or maybe you can meet demand at a time when the customer's needed most in a real way, right? So it's definitely a game changer in that regard. I always love to talk to the customers because I get to, you know, I hear from the vendor what they say and then I like to sort of validate it. So, you know, Vertica talks a lot about separating compute and storage and they're not the only one from an architectural standpoint to do that. But Vertica stresses that they're the only one that does that with a hybrid architecture. They can do it on-prem, they can do it in the cloud. From your experience, well, first of all, is that true? You may or may not know, but is that advantageous to you? And if so, why? Well, first of all, it's certainly true. Earlier in some of the original beta testing for the on-prem beyond mode stuff, we were able to participate in it and be aware of it. So it's certainly a reality day. It's actually supported on pure storage with FlashBlade and it's quite impressive. You know, for who that'll be for? Tough one, that's probably Vertica's question that they're probably still answering. But I think obviously some enterprise users that probably have some hybrid cloud, right? They have some architecture, they have some hardware that themselves want to make use of. We certainly would probably fit into one of their market segments that they would say we might be the ones to look at on-prem beyond mode. Begin to, the beauty of it is the elasticity, right? The idea that you could have this. And so a lot of times, so I want to go back real quick to separating the computer and- Sure, great. You know, we start by separating it. And I like to think of it maybe more as like decoupling because in a true way, it's not necessarily separated because ultimately you bring the computer and the storage back together. But to be able to decouple it quickly, replace nodes, bring in nodes, that certainly fits, I think, what we were trying to do in building this kind of, let me let the ecosystem that could respond to a unknown of a customer query, right? Or of a customer demand. I see, thank you for that clarification because you're right, it's really not separating, it's decoupling, and that's important because you can scale them independently but you still need compute and you still need storage to run your workloads, but from a cost standpoint, you don't have to buy it in chunks, you can buy the granular segments for whatever your workload requires. Is that the correct understanding? Yeah, and the ability to be able to reuse compute, though in the scenario of AWS or even in the scenario of your on-prem solution, you've got this data that's safe and secure and S3 are in pure storage, but then the compute that you have, you can reuse that, right? You could have a scenario that you have some query that needs more analytic, more firepower, more memory, more what-have-you that you have, and so you could kind of move compute and that's important, right? That's maybe more important than can I grow them separately? Can I borrow it? Can I borrow that compute you're using for my purpose, give it back, everything? And you can do that when you're so easily able to couple the compute but it's what you want, right? And likewise, if you have a down period where customers aren't using it, you'd like to be able to not use that, right? If you no longer require it, you'd like to give it back. So it opened the door to a lot of those things that allowed performance and cost to start to meet up. What if I can ask you a question, you mentioned pure a couple of times, so you're using pure FlashBlade on-prem, is that correct? That is the solution that is supported that is supported by Vertica for the on-prem. So at this point, we have been discussing with them about our own POCs for that. Before again, we back to the idea of how do we see ourself using it? And so we've certainly discussed the feasibility of bringing it in and giving it a shot but that's not something we're heavily on right now. Then what is Domo for Domo? Tell us about that. We really started this idea even in the company where we say, we should be using Domo in our everyday business, the sales folks, the marketing folks, right? Everybody was gonna use Domo, it's a business platform. For us in the engineering team, it was kind of like, well, if we use Domo, say for instance, to be better at the database engineers, now we've pointed Domo at itself, right? Vertica's running Domo in the background to some degree and then we turn around and say, hey Domo, how can we better at running you? And so it became this kind of cool thing we played with where we're now able to put some methods together where we can actually do that, right? We can monitor using our platform that's really good at processing large amounts of data and spitting out useful analytics, right? We take those analytics down, make recommendations, changes at the data. So now you've got Domo for Domo happening and it allows us to sit at home and work now even when we have to, even before we had to. Well, you know, look at us here, right? We couldn't meet in Boston physically, we're now meeting remote, you're on a hotspot because you got some weather and you had a light internet in Atlanta and we're having a great conversation. So we're here with Ben White who's a senior database engineer at Domo. I want to ask you about some of the envelope pushing that you've done around autonomous. You hear that word thrown around a lot, means a lot of things to a lot of different people. How do you look at autonomous and how does it fit with Enion and some of the other things that you're doing? You know, autonomous and the idea of autonomy is something that I don't even know that I have already ready to define. And so even in my discussion, I often mention it as a road to it because exactly where it is, it's hard to pin down because there's always this idea of how much trust do you give, right? To the system or how much is truly autonomous, how much of it is being intervened by us, the engineers. So I do hedge on using that, but on this road towards autonomy, when we look at how we're using Domo and even what that really means to Vertica because in a lot of my examples, in a lot of the things that we've engineered at Domo were designs that made it overcome something I thought was a limitation today. And so many times as we've done that, Vertica's kind of met us, like right after we kind of engineered or architected something we thought that could help. On our side, Vertica has some release that kind of addresses it. So the autonomy idea and the idea that we could analyze, metadata, make recommendations and then execute those recommendations without intervention is that road to autonomy. And once the databases start to able to do that, you can see in our ad hoc environment how that would be pretty useful where it was literally millions of queries every hour trying to figure out what's the best profile. For years I felt like IT folks sometimes really did not want that automation. They wanted the knobs to turn, but I wonder if you could comment. I mean, I feel as though the level of complexity now with cloud, with on-prem, with hybrid, multi-cloud, the scale, the speed, the real time, it just gets, the pace is just too much for humans. And so it's almost like the industry is going to have to capitulate to the machine and then really trust the machine. But I'm still sensing from you a little bit of hesitation there, but light at the end of the tunnel. I wonder if you could comment. Sure, I think in the light of the tunnel is even in the recent months and recent, we've really begin incorporated more machine learning and artificial intelligence into the model. And back to where we're saying it. So I do feel that we're getting closer to finding conditions that we don't know about. Cause right now our system is kind of a rules-based system where we've said, well, these are the things that we should be looking for. These are the things that we think are a problem to mature to the point where the databases recognize an anomalies and taking on pattern-matching things. These are problems you didn't know happen. And that's kind of the next step, right? Identifying the things you didn't know. And that's where that's the path we're on now. And that's probably more exciting even than kind of nailing down all the things you think you know and figure out what we don't know yet. So I want to close with, I know you're a prominent member of the, an respected member of the Vertica customer advisory board. You know, without divulging anything confidential, what are the kinds of things that you want Vertica to do going forward? I think some of the in-database autonomy, the ability to take some of the recommendations that we know we can derive from the metadata that already exists in the platform and start to execute some of the recommendations. Another thing we talked about, and I've been pretty open about talking to it, is talking about it is the, a new version of the database designer, I think is something that I'm sure they're working on. Lightweight, something that can give us that database design without the overhead. Those are two things I think, as they nail or particularly the database designer as they perfect that, they'll really have all the components in place that do in-base autonomy. And I think that's to some degree where they're headed. Yeah, nice. Well, Ben, listen, I really appreciate you coming on. You're a thought leader, very open, open-minded, Vertica's a really open community. I mean, they've always been quite transparent in terms of where they're going. It's just awesome to have guys like you on theCUBE to share with our community. So thank you so much. And hopefully we can meet face-to-face shortly. Absolutely, will you stay safe in Boston on one of my favorite towns? So no doubt when the doors get back open, I'll be coming down or coming out of the work. Take care. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Bellante with theCUBE. We're here covering the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference.