The database for all your AI needs

Marcel Kornacker, the creator of Apache Impala and co-creator of Apache Parquet, joins me to talk about his latest project: Pixeltable, a multimodal AI database that combines structured and unstructured data with rich, Python-native workflows.From ingestion to vector search, transcription to snapshots, Pixeltable eliminates painful data plumbing for modern AI teams.Follow MarcelPixeltable: https://pixeltable.comPixeltable GitHub: https://github.com/pixeltable/pixeltableLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelkornackerFollow AaronTwitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancisLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancisWebsite: https://aaronfrancis.com – find articles, podcasts, courses, and moreDatabase School: https://databaseschool.comChapters0:00 – Introduction0:20 – Meet Marcel Kornacker1:19 – Early career and grad school in databases2:12 – Joining Google and building F13:42 – How F1 used Spanner at Google4:01 – Starting Apache Impala at Cloudera6:02 – Why SQL still matters7:29 – What keeps Marcel fascinated with databases9:37 – The “SQL is dead” waves and shift to AI10:21 – Observing pain points in computer vision pipelines13:02 – Multimodal data challenges and the idea for Pixeltable16:10 – How Pixeltable handles transformations with computed columns26:29 – Example: processing video, audio, and transcripts in Pixeltable33:12 – DAG execution and parallelism explained37:00 – Transactional guarantees in Pixeltable39:00 – Iterators and chunking data for search42:26 – Using embeddings and semantic search47:05 – Updating data and incremental recomputation50:06 – Thoughts on RAG and hybrid search53:14 – Real-world use cases and dataset curation57:00 – Example: labeling food waste on cruise ships1:02:00 – Labeling workflows and syncing annotations1:02:41 – Pixeltable’s roadmap and cloud vision1:07:10 – How to get involved with Pixeltable1:09:03 – Closing and where to find Marcel