Context-Aware SQL and Metadata with Shinji Kim

Context-Aware SQL and Metadata with Shinji Kim

Author: softwareengineeringdaily.com September 4, 2025 Duration: 41:37
A common challenge in data-rich organizations is that critical context about the data is often hard to capture and even harder to keep up to date. As more people across the organization use data and data models get more complex, simply finding the right dataset can be slow and create bottlenecks. Select Star is a data discovery and metadata platform that builds a continuously updated knowledge graph of an organization’s data by analyzing both its structure and how it’s actually used. It enriches data with context such as popularity, lineage, and semantic models, making it easier for AI and teams to discover, trust, and use the right data. These enriched metadata layers are also highly valuable for large language models, significantly improving the accuracy of generated SQL queries. Shinji Kim is the founder and CEO of Select Star, and she joins Sean Falconer to discuss solving metadata curation challenges, managing data context at scale, using LLMs for SQL generation, emerging trends in metadata management, and more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Select Star. Sean's been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.   Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

For anyone curious about how the code running our world actually gets built, Software Engineering Daily offers a clear and consistent look behind the curtain. This isn't about hype cycles or surface-level news; it's a deep, technical conversation with the engineers, architects, and thinkers who are shaping our digital infrastructure. Each episode focuses on a specific technology, practice, or problem, breaking down complex systems into understandable parts. You'll hear detailed discussions on everything from database architectures and programming language design to the organizational challenges of scaling teams and the real-world trade-offs made in production systems. Hosted by softwareengineeringdaily.com, the podcast serves as a reliable source for developers who want to stay informed and inspired, translating the rapid pace of technological change into substantive, lasting knowledge. It’s for professionals who believe that understanding the "how" and "why" is just as important as knowing the "what." By dedicating time to thorough exploration, this podcast provides context that shorter formats simply cannot, making it an essential resource for anyone building the future, one line of code at a time. Tune in to hear unfiltered insights from the people on the front lines, discussing the tools and decisions that define modern software engineering.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
Prettier and Opinionated Code Formatting with James Long [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:07
Developer tooling shapes how software gets written day to day, but the best tools often disappear into the background once they succeed. Formatting, linting, and build systems can either create friction and endless debat…
Skate Story with Sam Eng [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 58:07
Skateboarding games have long balanced technical precision with a sense of flow and expression, but Skate Story takes the genre in a radically different direction. It has a distinct vaporwave vibe and blends fluid skate…
DeepMind’s RAG System with Animesh Chatterji and Ivan Solovyev [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:57
Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, has become a foundational approach to building production AI systems. However, deploying RAG in practice can be complex and costly. Developers typically have to manage vector datab…
Reinventing the Python Notebook with Akshay Agrawal [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:04
Interactive notebooks were popularized by the Jupyter project and have since become a core tool for data science, research, and data exploration. However, traditional, imperative notebooks often break down as projects gr…
Organizational Context for AI Coding Agents with Dennis Pilarinos [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:21
AI agents have taken on a growing share of software development work, so much so that the hardest problems are shifting away from code generation towards something new, context. The challenge is now contextualizing why s…
Amazon’s IDE for Spec-Driven Development with David Yanacek [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 59:00
AI-assisted coding tools have made it easier than ever to spin up prototypes, but turning those prototypes into reliable, production-grade systems remains a major challenge. Large language models are non-deterministic, p…
Engineering AI Systems for Autonomy and Resilience with Krishna Sai [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:14
Enterprise IT systems have grown into sprawling, highly distributed environments spanning cloud infrastructure, applications, data platforms, and increasingly AI-driven workloads. Observability tools have made it easier…
Inside China’s Great Firewall with Jackson Sippe [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 58:40
China's Great Firewall is often spoken about but is rarely understood. It is one of the most sophisticated and opaque censorship systems on the planet, and it shapes how over a billion people interact with the global int…
Optimizing Agent Behavior in Production with Gideon Mendels [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:25
LLM -powered systems continue to move steadily into production, but this process is presenting teams with challenges that traditional software practices don't commonly encounter. Models and agents are non-deterministic s…