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 Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/gotocon.com) Twitter (https://twitter.com/GOTOcon) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/goto_con) LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto-) Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences) CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech (https://gotopia.tech) SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL (https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1) - new videos posted daily!