When Phoenix Jay (K Health) started her Master's in Applied Analytics, it was with the assumption that she’d quickly land a gig in data science. But by the time she graduated, the field had changed—as had every Data Scientist job posting. This shift brought uncertainty, but also opportunity. Learn how she adjusted her path to begin applying “classical” data science paradigms to analytics.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19DviXCiciRh3dq-5cSTXkPqA7CppUUKAsfpm6dmn0l8/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

The Modern Data Stack is becoming more and more fragmented. With new tools and processes popping up continuously, it’s easy to get stranded on various “data islands”, with everything running independently. In this session, we’ll teach you:

• What benefits you gain by turning your Modern Data Stack into an Integrated Data Stack

• How Shipyard can help you quickly connect the data tools you already use

• How orchestration is the missing step in your data journey to get your team off “data islands”

• How dbt fits into the picture of a connected data stack

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NT7RnMtTLxb5ew5_VXXzciJusfbBKZJx86B6BtNZv90/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

"They’re looking for someone technical, but business-oriented.” Says the newly minted analytics engineer—quietly content in her ability to be everything to everyone. But "purple" work can still be perilous: roadmap uncertainty, stakeholder confusion, an unending list of new things to learn... In practice, becoming an efficient generalist requires a specific skill set, one not often taught in schools. In this talk, Stephen Bailey (Whatnot) shares how to navigate the most complex, but rewarding bits of interdisciplinary data work.

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

The days of unrestrained cloud spending are coming to an end. In the coming months, data teams will increasingly be asked to better understand, monitor and reduce their data warehouse spend. The problem? Practitioners aren't equipped with the tools to do this well. In this talk, Ian Whitestone (Shopify) and Jonathan Talmi (Snapcommerce) will share their own end-to-end process for cutting warehouse spend, diving into the actual strategies they've deployed to give practitioners immediately actionable processes and techniques to keep costs controlled.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SDONuIrAHbdDF0YyZ5krmAnibUTJbL9qosEeoDjFRPM/edit#slide=id.p

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Lineage is a critical component of any root cause, impact analysis, and overall analytics heath assessment workflow. But it hasn’t always been easy to create, particularly at the field level. In this session, Mei Tao, Helena Munoz, and Xuanzi Han (Monte Carlo) tackle this challenge head-on by leveraging some of the most popular tools in the modern data stack, including dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, and ANother Tool for Language Recognition (ANTLR). Learn how they designed the data model, query parser, and larger database design for field-level lineage—highlighting learnings, wrong turns, and best practices developed along the way.

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Insensatez in Portuguese means folly, unwisdom. In other words, doing something you deep down know you shouldn't. Data practitioners don't always have the right incentives or organizational influence to advocate for the solutions that they believe are best fit for the problems they are solving. Join Felippe Felisola Caso (Loft) as he bravely wades into the awkward and often unspoken feelings between leaders and analysts. Through an exploration of organizational feelings and perspectives, attendees can expect to walk away with a greater capacity for empathy, as well as proven strategies for improving communication and building alignment.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TKtveMXtFBoCALp_pb7bO9ggV5KU_xeeZRhFSS72OJw/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Without the right discipline and enablement, even a small data-informed startup can quickly become a complex maze of spreadsheets, queries, metrics and analysis. In an organization where access to relevant information is not prioritized, chaos will prevail. Come learn from Karen, a product manager at growing retail startup ALPHA Camp, share the insights she's earned from tackling this problem head on. In this session, she'll share effective strategies for building trust and partnering effectively across business and engineering functions, and how prioritizing structure and shared meaning is where it all starts.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BKMm8o-LvbmWuR6-xIQS1sHWhzEZQeVTNuO19kaXpUM/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Data suggests that occupational identity has consequences for work engagement which in turn influences turnover intention. In a “new normal” with hybrid work environments and ever-increasing employee turnover, it’s crucial that our employees are engaged and feel a sense of belonging. As a data team manager, Kasey Mazza knows how important it is to build a community of data-minded folks that gives your people a place to learn, grow, and thrive.

Join Kasey as she discusses the things they’ve done at HubSpot to build a sense of community and camaraderie both within her team and across their entire data community of ~400 people. This talk will highlight:

• Why diversity matters

• Living your values

• Leading with curiosity and empathy

• Creating intentional space

• Reducing or avoiding burnout

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18vaqHWIt6q47YjkZhh3LSfzF6PL8ltpCDf8vnY6sKrs/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

In this live, instructor-led hands-on lab, you’ll learn how to build a modern data stack with Databricks and dbt, using dbt to manage data transformations in Databricks and perform exploratory data analysis on the clean data sets using Databricks SQL. Based on the lakehouse architecture and built on an open data lake, data analysts, analytics engineers, and data scientists can use dbt and Databricks to work with the freshest and most complete data, and quickly derive new insights for accurate decision-making.

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

The products that make up the “modern data stack” have all grown to prominence over the past decade. In this heady time, so much has changed about how data work is done.

But some of the “rules of engagement” that defined the original modern data stack are starting to break down. As a result, big changes are coming for the data tooling ecosystem.

The end result? Better, more integrated tooling, used by more humans inside of every company, that actually understands the data that it is operating on.

This modern data stack—if we still want to call it that!—will be unrecognizable to its former self.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G0c3w19AwBEWEzyd9vwTKK5zMvXR76-NPQn6x0xZoSg/view

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

"So what exactly do you do...?" As a data person, you may have been on the receiving end of this question before and that's because the value delivered by data teams is still not clear for many organizations. This makes it challenging to get appropriate investments for data teams to unlock value. Or on the other end of the spectrum, lack of scrutiny of data work can lead to major inefficiencies.

As data professionals, we should care about the value we create and evangelise our work better. The first step needed is a shared common language between data and its stakeholders. In this talk, Rifat Majumder (Education Perfect) explores a framework that he's been using with executives and business partners to convey the value delivered by data teams. Data leaders can use this to evangelize their team's work and get the right levels of investment they deserve.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZLgepjj1i9JbI95ShMIBggG5dbp1nGNAkQrG1QU6MBE/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Welcome to the dbt Package show! Have you ever wondered how Fivetran approaches building dbt packages? Well, put on your aprons, because the Fivetran team is going to give you a glimpse at their recipe for building packages with dbt from 0 release to implementation. Sheri Nguyen of Fivetran will show you:

• How they leverage the dbt Community to get the right ingredients for our packages and plan our roadmap for end state package models

• Their methodologies and standards for preparing ingredients for our data models to provide flexibility for all our users

• How they combine everything together and cook up our models for our dbt packages

Finally, after all the cooking is done, the best part is sharing what you've made with your friends and family. Sheri will also show you how different companies use our various packages and how you can contribute! This talk will benefit those who want to leverage Fivetran's dbt packages, understand why we apply certain modeling practices, and understand how we continually iterate on these packages. Additionally, this session will be beneficial for those who also want to be dbt package maintainers and understand how they can contribute future packages.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QKvnxnfRBrZKOnBGwXkLnc-EjLS4S3mbSe59kjHhMos/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Got your Modern Data Stack setup, now what? A mature data practice goes beyond setting up the data pipeline, and ensures there are both systems and processes in place to make it easy for everyone to find and understand data. At Select Star, we work with many organizations to enable data discovery, so the “tribal knowledge” of data is searchable and understandable for everyone. In this session, we’ll share the best practices and change management tips for setting up a data discovery portal and making it the single source of truth of data for your business.

Check the slides here:https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1F3CPBhWenf2jt5hmXrhXvOBe5wei6hcLUj95jZtVZEw/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Most analysts don’t become analysts to build dashboards. We don’t become analysts to do data pulls, or clean up messy data, or put together pitch decks. We become analysts to do impactful, strategic analysis. This is our calling; it’s the most valuable work that we do; and it’s why we put up with the rest of our job—for that afternoon with nothing but a big question, a clear calendar, and a trajectory-changing aha moment buried somewhere in our well-prepped datasets.

But the rapid rise of analytics engineering should make us question all of this. Is strategic analysis actually the holy grail of analytics? Is it the most valuable thing we could do? Is it even what we want to do?

In chasing this ambition, Benn Stancil (Mode) thinks we’ve lost sight of something even more important—and potentially, more interesting: Designing operational models. These frameworks, which are a natural extension of the semantic models built by analytics engineers, are often more valuable than any dashboard, any dataset, or any deep dive analysis.

In his talk, Benn will share what these models are, why they’re valuable, and why, in our eternal quest to both quantify our value and to find work we love, they could prove to be our holy grail we’ve always been looking for.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lOH6Sb8DQnnlmZkYOlqqHgQeXKkUEQCm_LOxsjBRJlM/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

There's a kind of funny (and painful) paradigm that exists in the data world: more data, more problems. As companies grow their data, there's more broken dashboards to find, impacted users to chase, and cobbling data together that happens. But what if there was tooling to make the scaling process a little less painful, and a lot more scalable?

Join Marion Pavillet (MUX) and Kevin Hu (Metaplane) as they share stories around scaling data stacks at a large and small companies, demonstrate how they used modern tools to help improve data lineage and accuracy, and discuss the power of metadata in improving data products over time. Attendees can expect to leave this session with new concepts they can use to frame problems faced by rapidly growing companies, a blueprint for implementing DataOps, and solutions to which they can map their own situations.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jL2OfAyPFJl0Dq6evmdwnpK6xrebNxEbjVj1nIcwXsU/

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Historically, analytics has been focused on "what happened." And to this day, newer and newer generations of tooling, dbt for example, have come forth accelerating the speed and utility of data in an enterprise for decision making. Machine learning, on the other hand (the "what will happen"), has seemingly been stood up as a separate silo with an organization with seemingly "more intricate" technical requirements, the need for "data scientist", and done so all in the name of how to handle "more special" data resulting in "more accurate" decision making. In this session, you will learn how to cut through the noise and extend and leverage your analytic practice with Snowflake and dbt Labs into the realm of machine learning by pairing your analytical pipelines with a feature store layer to declaratively serve both model training and model scoring scenarios, even at some of the lowest latency (real-time) production requirements.

This session requires pre-registration. Sign up here. If session is filled you are welcome to come to the room and join the waitlist onsite. Open seats will be made available 10 minutes after session start.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1H-aPsc2DkPGcJUV4pd_iLSdMMMAMZTEtsAFO4hpglXM/edit#slide=id.g15a4510fa6a_0_560

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

dbt has changed the game for data practitioners, bringing velocity, organizational efficiency, and increased trust to modern analytics workflows. But what happens to your dbt models after they’ve been built? Too often the value you create goes untapped by the business, or accessed only by a select few. dbt Labs and ThoughtSpot are teaming up to unleash the true potential of your transformed data. Learn how to deliver trustworthy data and insights to frontline users at scale with safe, reliable self-service analytics.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XFyP8d0wkfnA1_59zb1zbNYInSSzdI2qe09f6OkhRE0/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

When does your team decided it’s time to move beyond a singular dbt run? For most analytics engineers, there comes a time when the dbt run commands on fixed schedules simply won’t make the cut. Join Prratek Ramchandani (Vox Media) as he breaks down an alternative approach to orchestrating your dbt project with Dagster that balances meeting SLAs with safely handling the edge cases a simple schedule-based dbt run might create.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zivYO_EpN6T9JYM9HjAJAz3bK3e2TREwdKffylkzuUw/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

While the data lakehouse architecture offers many inherent benefits, it’s still relatively new to the dbt community, which creates hurdles to adoption.

In this talk, you’ll meet Apache Hudi, a platform used by organizations to build planet-scale data platforms according to all of the key design elements required by the lakehouse architecture. You’ll also learn how we’ve personaly used Hudi, along with dbt, Spark, Airflow, and many more open-source tools to build a truly reliable big data streaming lakehouse that cut the latency of our petabyte-scale data pipelines from hours to minutes.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18dv4TZzRnZQ-IK7xLkYJuind4Bcztkl19zV7b4HTaTU/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Calling all Snowflake and dbt admins! Come learn how to utilize dbt to manage Snowflake users and network policies and keep your data stack simple and lean while version controlling Snowflake’s RBAC and network policies.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IxmDMgVaOYb0PTEWej-k3l0avKrmHI970oT7_Xpg0Z4/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Web 3.0 is constantly evolving: everyday there are new smart contracts, project updates, tokens and chains. And just because the data is on the blockchain and public does not mean it's easily accessible and digestible. It may be easy to monitor specific parts of the blockchain such as a particular smart contract, but how do you build a scalable infrastructure flexible enough to account for any new business request in a rapidly evolving industry?

Join Alec Kamra (Mythical Games) as he shows you how to do just this. As a blockchain gaming platform, Mythical Games has built a stable and flexible multi-chain solution using Google BQ's public datasets and a few external APIs that allow them to monitor all trades and transfers for their business needs.

Check the slides here:https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14wcMHKAGhm9qvZ2NlPSv1wQj5FJF-ttL4k3lAivt6Fk/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Learn about the skills and abilities we seek at dbt Labs!

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Lbhz8R11sNedSUmo26ia_hPV8XHncBxhH09GMQdofa8/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

There’s a good chance you’re an analytics engineer who just sort of landed in an analytics engineering career. Or made a murky transition from data science/data engineering/software engineering to full-time analytics person. When did you realize you fell into the wild world of analytics engineering?

In this session, Michael Chow (RStudio) draws upon his experience building open source data science tools and working with the data science community to discuss the early signs of a budding analytics engineer, and the small steps these folks can take to keep the best parts of Python and R, all while moving towards engineering best practices.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1H2fVa-I4D8ibanlqLutIrwPOVypIlXVzEITDUNzzPpU/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

Analytics at a startup….something that might scare most data folks. But not Lindsay Murphy of Maple! Join Lindsay as she draws on her experiences to demystify and template the process behind using dbt to create robust self-service analytics practices at startups and other small companies.

Check the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GMe4K3UQgJESozHV2-p19OwJoBQJ3VEfZaX-cthsYdU/edit?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.

The year is 2022, data teams are earning their stripes, data work is being valued, and our organizations recognize that analytics engineering is no longer the future of data teams—it’s the present. Join Mong Dang as she discusses how Aritzia, a normal company with a talented and growing roster of data team members, scaled up their delivery of quality data through analytics engineering and leveraged their data product management approach. Like all experimental work, Mong will cover what they tried, what has been working, what didn’t work, and where they still have questions and can learn more on.

Check the slides here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iZkrLvF6UkzE_XfF06B4dZncRSMo6nNY/view?usp=sharing

Coalesce 2023 is coming! Register for free at https://coalesce.getdbt.com/.