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Brian Оlsen

U.S. Marine turned Software Engineer seeking to remove the pain of his fellow Software Engineer one Trino query at a time.

Brian Оlsen is a U.S. Marine turned software engineer and developer advocate who has been deeply involved in open-source data technologies. He currently works as the Head of Developer Relations at Tabular and was previously a Developer Advocate at Starburst from July 2020 to April 2023.12

Professional Background:

  • Started his career in computation and databases while working in the military
  • Began working with big data teams after college, initially in a Hive environment
  • Became a Trino (formerly Presto) contributor and community member
  • Worked at Starburst as a Developer Advocate, focusing on community growth and education1

Key Achievements:

  • Contributed to the Presto/Trino open-source project, specifically improving the Elasticsearch connector
  • Grew the Trino YouTube channel from 140 to 1,240 subscribers in two years
  • Created and hosted the Trino Community Broadcast
  • Actively engaged in community events, meetups, and conferences
  • Worked on routing messages between community members and Trino maintainers2

Technical Experience:

  • Worked at companies like Trustwave as a Software Engineer
  • Developed data lifecycle pipelines and federated search utilities
  • Experienced with technologies like Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Mongo, and Docker2

Brian describes himself as an idealist and social egalitarian who loves positive-sum games and is passionate about open-source software.23

Highlights

Mar 27 · linkedin

Bergy Bits: Graphs, no not the Excel kind

Many problems in business and science can be modeled as graph problems, and yet adoption of graph databases is sparse (pun intended).

Graph modeling and traversal over complex relationships between entities in a database present a challenge to general relational models. While possible to model the complex relationships of graphs in SQL, bending the relational language to graph traversal distracts from the true intent of the query. Graph databases developed specialized languages to represent these complex relations and experimented with specialized data representations on disk, tightly coupling the language to the storage layer. The value in aligning mental models with the language is much clearer than the need for specialized storage for graph databases.

I'm joined by PuppyGraph founders Weimo Liu, Danfeng Xu, and Matt Tanner to discuss graph query engines on #ApacheIceberg.

#DataEngineering

Jun 15 · linkedin

I'm really looking forward to seeing the "Let it Snow for #TrinoDB" presentation by Erik from Bloomberg and Teng YU from ForePaaS! Let me tell you a #opensource community story.

Both Bloomberg and ForePaaS had developed Snowflake connectors for Trino independently, using them now for the past year. Teng, contributed a PR for ForePaaS's connector in hopes that they wouldn't need to maintain it themselves moving forward. This wasn't the first #SnowflakeDB PR in the community that had been created. The same issue ended up holding Teng's PR for a year. What was it?

Lack of testing infrastructure. Trino Software Foundation has high standards around integration testing to ensure we don't introduce regressions as both projects progress.

Recently, at the latest Trino Contributor Congregation, something changed. Erik brought up their desire to contribute Bloomberg's Snowflake connector as well and finally, we unearthed that the lack of Snowflake infrastructure was still the issue. Erik had a simple solution, "Oh yeah, Bloomberg will provide that.." And just like that, a solution was found. I connected Erik and Teng to work on a solution together and today, they will be giving a talk in about 45 min at #TrinoFest. I can't tell you how excited I am for this connector to finally land!

Great work, patience, and dedication to everyone involved!!

Register: https://lnkd.in/g3aG6Ytm PR: https://lnkd.in/g6TkrpAH

#dataengineering

Related Questions

What projects has Brian Оlsen worked on at Starburst?
How did Brian Оlsen transition from the military to a career in big data?
What are Brian Оlsen's main responsibilities as a developer advocate at Starburst?
How did Brian Оlsen contribute to the Presto community before joining Starburst?
What impact has Brian Оlsen had on the Trino community?
Brian Оlsen
Brian Оlsen, photo 1
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Location

Greater Chicago Area