Revision control and CI/CD has completely transformed the way we write and deliver software. Yet data management has not kept pace with these changes. Data assets are still managed using RDBMSs, or worse, with CSVs or Excel spreadsheets. Since many software applications rely on data assets, this presents a serious problem for data-driven software. TerminusDB is a graph database which provides distributed revision control features natively, enabling us to lift best practices for CI/CD to data-driven applications. It supports a suite of features popularized by git: push, pull, clone, fork, merge etc. enabling complex data pipelining and continuous delivery.

In this talk we will discuss the technical and architectural challenges that had to be overcome to make this concept a reality.

Bio:
Dr. Gavin Mendel-Gleason is CTO of TerminusDB. He is a former research fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the School of Statistics and Computer Science. His research focuses on databases, logic and verification in software engineering. His work includes contributing to the Seshat global historical databank, an ambitious project to record and analyze patterns in human history. He is the inventor of the Web Object Query Language and the primary architect of TerminusDB. He is interested in improving the best practices of the software development community and a strong believer in formal methods and the use of mathematics and logic as disciplines to increase the quality and robustness of software.