Building Planetary-Scale Data Systems with Venice • Felix GV & Olimpiu Pop

This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted.
https://gotopia.tech

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/421

Félix GV - Current Interests: Multi-Planetary Databases, Data Sovereignty & Lifelogging
Olimpiu Pop - Technologist & Tech Journalist

RESOURCES
Félix
https://bsky.app/profile/felixgv.ninja
https://github.com/FelixGV
https://www.linkedin.com/in/felixgv

Olimpiu
https://x.com/olimpiupop
https://github.com/zroll
https://www.linkedin.com/in/olimpiupop

Links
https://venicedb.org
https://github.com/linkedin/venice
https://rocksdb.org
https://duckdb.org

DESCRIPTION
Félix GV, a former engineer at LinkedIn and architect of the Venice database system, discusses the complexity of building planetary-scale data systems. He explains Venice's unbundled architecture where each component—from Kafka-based pub/sub to RocksDB-powered servers—operates as an independent distributed system. Félix details their rigorous chaos engineering practices, including regular load tests that push data centers beyond normal capacity to ensure reliability.

The discussion covers fundamental distributed systems concepts like the CAP theorem and the trade-offs between consistency and availability in multi-region deployments. He also explains why Venice, as a derived data system, deliberately sacrifices strong consistency for high throughput and availability, and concludes by discussing their experimental integration of DuckDB for SQL-based analytics and data exploration capabilities.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Kasun Indrasiri & Danesh Kuruppu • gRPC: Up and Running • https://amzn.to/3sBGBJJ
Tomer Shiran, Jason Hughes & Alex Merced • Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide • https://amzn.to/488Z30k
William Smith • Arrow Flight Protocols and Practices • https://amzn.to/4o2Q2fd
Adi Polak • Scaling Machine Learning with Spark • https://amzn.to/3N9vx1H
Mark Needham, Michael Hunger & Michael Simons • DuckDB in Action • https://amzn.to/45QwSli
Simon Aubury & Ned Letcher • Getting Started with DuckDB • https://amzn.to/3VPk4q


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