Ever wondered why data integration is still such a nightmare in 2025? Marty Pitt has built something that might finally solve it.

TaxiQL isn't just another query language - it's a semantic layer that lets you query across any system without caring about field names, API differences, or where the data actually lives. Instead of writing endless mapping code between your microservices, databases, and APIs, you describe what your data *means* and let TaxiQL figure out how to get it.

In this conversation, Marty walks through the “All Powerful Spreadsheet” moment that sparked TaxiQL, how semantic types work in practice, and why this approach might finally decouple producers from consumers in large organizations. We dive deep into query execution, data lineage, streaming integration, and the technical challenges of building a system that can connect anything to anything.

If you've ever spent months mapping fields between systems or maintaining brittle integration code, this one's for you.
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TaxiLang Homepage: https://taxilang.org/
TaxiLang Playground: https://playground.taxilang.org/examples/message-queue-and-database
Taxi Lang GitHub repository: https://github.com/taxilang/taxilang
OpenAPI Specification (formerly Swagger): https://swagger.io/specification/
YOW! Conference - Australian software conference series: https://yowconference.com/
Spring Framework Kotlin support: https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-kotlin/
Ubiquitous Language (DDD Concept): https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UbiquitousLanguage.html

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social
Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins
Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

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0:00 Intro
3:42 The Ever-Present Problem of Data Integration
11:42 What Was The Big Insight?
24:21 Who Takes Responsibility For Annotating Data?
27:26: How Are Widely Distributed Systems Decoupled?
30:26 Once You've Described The System, How Do You Query It?
36:14 How Do You Handle Cardinality?
39:38 What Does The Query Language Look Like?
43:02 How Do Queries Survive System Migrations?
46:59 What If Producer Teams Are Unavailable?
47:31 How Is a Query Actually Executed?
52:10 Optimizing Data Gathering
56:01 Where Does The Engine Run? Is It Distributed?
57:26 The Kotlin Advantage
1:03:00 Does Taxi Handle Streaming Data?
1:10:24 High Availability in Query Execution
1:12:10 The Importance of Data Lineage
1:15:51 Connecting to Custom/Legacy Systems?
1:20:33 Extending Language Support
1:26:26 What's Missing? Future Development Plans
1:29:44 Outro

Developer Voices

Systems integration costs $500 billion annually due to the complexity of connecting disparate systems with different data formats, protocols, and semantic meanings. TaxiQL offers a solution by creating a semantic layer that allows systems to describe what their data means rather than just its structure. This approach decouples producers and consumers by focusing on business concepts rather than field names, enabling automatic query resolution across multiple systems without tight coupling to specific APIs or data formats.

The $500 Billion Integration Problem, And One Possible Solution (with Marty Pitt)