Surfline uses Segment to collect product analytics events to understand how surfers use their forecasts and live surf cameras across 9000+ surf spots worldwide. An open source tool was developed to define and manage product analytics event schemas using JSON schema which are used to build dbt staging models for all events.

With this solution, the data team has more time to build intermediate and mart models in dbt, knowing that our staging layer fully reflects Surfline’s product analytics events. This presentation is a real-life example on how schemas (or data contracts) can be used as a medium to build consensus, enforce standards, improve data quality, and speed up the dbt workflow for product analytics.

Speaker: Greg Clunies, Senior Analytics Engineer, Surfline

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/