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
Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development with Steve Yegge [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:10:37
AI-assisted programming has moved far beyond autocomplete. Large language models are now capable of editing entire codebases, coordinating long-running tasks, and collaborating across multiple systems. As these capabilit…
Python 3.14 with Łukasz Langa [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:30
Python 3.14 is here and continues Python’s evolution toward greater performance, scalability, and usability. The new release formally supports free-threaded, no-GIL mode, introduces template string literals, and implemen…
Airbnb’s Open-Source GraphQL Framework with Adam Miskiewicz [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:12
Engineering teams often build microservices as their systems grow, but over time this can lead to a fragmented ecosystem with scattered data access patterns, duplicated business logic, and an uneven developer experience.…
OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:09
AI coding agents are rapidly reshaping how software is built, reviewed, and maintained. As large language model capabilities continue to increase, the bottleneck in software development is shifting away from code generat…
Production-Grade AI Systems with Fred Roma [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:49
Engineering teams around the world are building AI-focused applications or integrating AI features into existing products. The AI development ecosystem is maturing, which is accelerating how quickly these applications ca…
WebAssembly 3.0 with Andreas Rossberg [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:12
WebAssembly, or WASM, has grown from a low-level compilation target for C and C++ into one of the most influential technologies in modern computing. It now powers browser applications, edge compute platforms, embedded sy…
The New Digital Surveillance State with Michael Soyfer [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:31
Surveillance technology is advancing faster than the laws meant to govern it. Across the United States, police departments are deploying automated license plate readers, facial recognition tools, and predictive systems t…
Developer Experience at Capital One with Catherine McGarvey [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:32
Modern software development is evolving rapidly. New tools, processes, and AI-powered systems are reshaping how teams collaborate and how engineers find satisfaction in their craft. At the same time, developer experience…