Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Commercial entities are necessary to scale and sustain open-source projects

Wes McKinney · Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark) · Feb 1, 2021 · at 19:15

Wes McKinney, creator of Pandas and Apache Arrow, explains why he transitioned from open-source consortium Ursa Labs to commercial startup Ursa Computing.

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“It became clear to me and to many people that that to have more of a commercial engine behind Arrow and the Arrow ecosystem was important for enabling the ecosystem to continue to grow for us to be able to pour a lot more resources into the open source project.”

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Opinion
Apache Spark failed to effectively shrink down to single-node scale
“One of the things that you find with things like Spark is that they really failed to shrink down and, Effectively do computing at the single node scale.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 24:22 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Over 90% of Python tabular data passes through Pandas
“I'd say, you know, nine, more than 90% of the data that's coming into structured data processing in, in the Python ecosystem, tabular data processing is passing through pandas at some point at some point in its lifetime.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 0:46 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McKinney predicts every data warehouse will soon support Apache Arrow
“So I think that, that, you know, in the course of the next few years you know, pretty much every database system, every data warehouse Is going to support aero based import and export in some format.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 16:59 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Running Apache Spark on a single node is slower than Pandas
“You can use spark at the single node scale as an alternative to pandas through the koalas interface, but you'll find that for many workloads, it's simply slower than pandas, which is not super impressive.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 24:30 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pandas never had a significant corporate sponsor
“Pandas never really had a significant corporate sponsor who was you know putting in the majority of contributions. Like it really was a community project almost, you know from the get go.”
Wes McKinney Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 1:53 Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
ODBC and JDBC were never designed for bulk data transfer
“Protocols like interfaces like ODBC and JDBC were never designed Or intended for bulk data transfer, like on the order of gigabytes, for example.”
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