Join Kostas and Nitay as they speak with amazingly smart people who are building the next generation of technology, from hardware to cloud compute.
Tech on the Rocks is for people who are curious about the foundations of the tech industry.
Recorded primarily from our offices and homes, but one day we hope to record in a bar somewhere.
Cheers!
OCSF, Schemas, and the Convergence of Security and Data Engineering with Zach Schmerber
Zach joins Kostas and Nitay to trace how security data turned into a full-blown data engineering problem. He walks through his path from hospital networks with a sprawling attack surface, into tightly regulated banking, and then into big tech, where petabyte-scale volumes broke the Splunk-style stack he was hired to optimize and pushed him toward columnar storage and table formats like Iceberg and Delta.
From there the conversation digs into OCSF, the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework: why a producer-side schema would shrink the mountain of cleanup work defenders do today, how an unusually open community formed around it in a famously secretive industry, and why security schemas have to standardize semantics and values, not just structure. Zach, Kostas and Nitay also get into the overlap between security and observability stacks, the unknown-unknowns problem that forces teams to store data they may never query, the case for a metrics-plus-security semantic layer, and what changes when agents both need clean context and become the thing you have to monitor.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Zach's background in cybersecurity
01:09 Early days in healthcare cybersecurity and data detection
02:19 The rise of Splunk and schema on read in security
03:07 Moving from healthcare to banking and regulated environments
04:21 Transition to big tech and handling massive data volumes
08:35 How Splunk's distributed compute works and scaling challenges
10:45 The shift towards modern data stacks and table formats
11:32 Introduction to the Open Cyber Security Schema Framework (OCSF)
14:00 Community and collaboration in cybersecurity data standards
15:36 The future of data schemas and standardization in security
20:59 Behavioral analytics and threat modeling in cybersecurity
23:28 The role of schemas in reducing security data complexity
28:01 Convergence of security data and observability
34:46 The impact of LLMs and AI on cybersecurity practices
50:46 The future of OCSF and standardization in cybersecurity
4 Aug 2026
Feeding the Agents: Fast Structured Data Retrieval with Arrow — Ian Cook, Co-founder & CEO of Columnar
In this episode, we talk with Ian Cook, co-founder and CEO of Columnar and a member of the Apache Arrow Project Management Committee, about ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity) and why the way applications connect to databases is overdue for a rethink.
Ian traces the history from the row-oriented database APIs of the 1990s, ODBC and JDBC, to today's world where nearly every analytic database and destination tool is columnar under the hood. He explains why keeping data in a columnar format end to end, using Apache Arrow, can deliver 10x to 100x speedups by turning a CPU-bound conversion problem back into a fast, network-friendly one, and why ADBC's flexible driver model works even against row-oriented systems like Postgres.
We then dig into the AI angle: how fast structured data retrieval matters more than ever when agents reason in milliseconds and bottleneck on tool calls, why today's models still lean on tool calls to understand tabular data, and what tabular foundation models might change. Along the way we cover Parquet, DuckDB, Snowflake, string view, the DeWitt clause and benchmarking culture, and Arrow's philosophy of growing an ecosystem by building consensus rather than enemies.
Ian also shares how to try ADBC yourself with the dbc CLI, a UV-inspired installer that makes it easy to install drivers for 20+ databases (columnar.tech/dbc).
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Ian Cook and Columner
01:53 Understanding ADBC and Its Relationship with Arrow
10:10 The Need for Columnar Paradigms in Database Connectivity
14:37 Exploring Use Cases for ADBC in Modern Applications
18:41 Performance Impacts of ADBC in Various Systems
27:38 Integrating ADBC with AI and LLMs
37:26 The Future of ADBC and Its Role in Data Infrastructure
7 Jul 2026
Falling Into Databases: The DuckDB Story with Hannes Mühleisen
In this episode, we sit down with Hannes Mühleisen, co-founder and CEO of Duck Labs and co-creator of DuckDB, for a wide-ranging conversation about how a self-described outsider ended up reshaping the analytics database world.
Hannes shares how he accidentally fell into databases after moving to Amsterdam, why that outsider perspective helped him spot the “warts” everyone else had accepted, and his theory that traditional databases were “sold on the golf course” rather than built for the people who actually use them.
We dig into the origins of DuckDB: the decision to throw away a working prototype and rebuild from scratch, the untapped gap between Excel/pandas and Spark, and why in-process analytics unlocked a whole new class of users. Hannes also explains the “venture communism” reasoning behind open-sourcing a project built with Dutch tax dollars, how a single Hacker News post lit the fuse, and the philosophy of solving one real user problem at a time.
Finally, we get into the latest work — DuckLake, the Quack client-server protocol, the “never give up, never surrender” approach to queries that refuse to crash, and what changes when the entity querying your database shifts from humans to machines.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Hannes and His Journey into Databases
02:35 The Outsider Perspective in Database Development
05:12 The Evolution of Database Sales and User Experience
08:01 The Rise of Open Source in Database Systems
10:56 Building DuckDB: Challenges and Innovations
13:31 The Gap in OLAP Systems and the Emergence of DuckDB
16:05 Creating a New Market for Analytics with DuckDB
19:05 The Impact of Open Source and Academic Roots
21:57 The Philosophy Behind Open Sourcing DuckDB
28:02 The Value of Public Funding in Research
29:46 Open Source Strategy and Market Credibility
31:39 Launching DuckDB: Initial Reactions and Strategies
35:07 Learning from User Feedback and Market Needs
38:38 The Challenges of Database Development
42:34 Innovations in Client-Server Protocols
47:02 The Evolution of Client-Server Protocols
52:57 Future Aspirations for DuckDB and Community Engagement
Who has been a guest on Tech on the Rocks
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YouTube
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Engagement
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