Jordan Tigani is an expert in large-scale data processing, having spent a decade+ in the development and growth of BigQuery, and later SingleStore. Today, Jordan and his team at MotherDuck are in the early days of working on commercial applications for the open source DuckDB OLAP database. In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Jordan dives into the origin story of BigQuery, why he thinks we should do away with the concept of working in files, and how truly performant “data apps” will require bringing data to an end user’s machine (rather than requiring them to query a warehouse directly).