Presto at Varsity Tutors: Using Federated Queries to Power External Reporting – John Cross

Presto at Varsity Tutors: Using Federated Queries to Power External Reporting – John Cross

Varsity Tutors is a learning platform that enables online academic, professional, and enrichment learning. A growing part of their offering partners with school districts to provide customized support for teachers and students. Varsity Tutors for Schools provides external reporting capabilities including student assessments, progress reports, and more. To provide these timely reports, Varsity Tutors (an AWS shop) uses Presto scripts to perform federated queries across MySQL, Postgres, and Redshift and writes data back to S3. They use Ahana Cloud as their managed service for Presto. In this session, John will discuss what technologies they evaluated, why they chose Presto, and their current data architecture including how they handle security for cross-account writes and how they perform upserts into the final reporting database.

Headless BI Architecture and Trade-offs – Pavel Tiunov, Cube Dev

Headless BI Architecture and Trade-offs – Pavel Tiunov, Cube Dev

There has been a proliferation of tools in different categories of the modern data stack. This talk will focus on the Headless BI category and Cube’s implementation of Headless BI. Headless BI injects a component between data warehouses and other data sources and tools on the other side of the stack (e.g. CDP, data exploration tools, custom data apps, etc.). This new component encapsulates several critical functions like data modeling, access control, and aggregate awareness while deliberately omitting others, like data visualization and presentation. We’ll explore: – Keeping data models separate from data sources and not substituting data modeling with mere data transformation. – Managing access control centrally, aggregate awareness, and caching in a separate layer upstack from data consumers. – Removing data presentation features and embracing data accessibility via a set of APIs.