Active metadata is the thread that helps weave your data mesh. In this session, Austin Kronz, Director of Data Strategy at Atlan and Sean Rober, Head of Data at Avenue One, discuss how Atlan and dbt are central to how Avenue One enhances their data and analytics ecosystem, brings their product to market, and positions an already fast-paced start-up for scale.

Speakers: Austin Kronz, Director of Data Strategy, Atlan; Sean Rober, Head of Data, Avenue One

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

Data contracts have been much discussed in the community of late, with a lot of curiosity around how to approach this concept in practice and how it might enable shift-left developer-first governance and data quality. For organizations adopting dbt while also dealing with non-dbt data that is upstream of the warehouse, it can be challenging to understand how to apply data contracts uniformly across a fragmented stack. We are calling this harmonizing layer the Control Plane for Data - powered by the common thread across these systems: metadata.

In this talk, Shirshanka Das, CTO of Acryl Data and founder of the DataHub Project describes how you can use data contracts and DataHub to make your dbt centered stack more reliable - as well as other use cases that can help build a simpler, more flexible data stack.

Speaker: Shirshanka Das, CTO, Acryl Data

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

With the dbt Semantic Layer, you can define metrics alongside your dbt models, and access them from any integrated analytics tool.

The Semantic Layer has been totally revamped. It’s now powered by MetricFlow, allowing for more complex metric definition and a significantly improved querying experience. Join the dbt Labs product team as they dive into what’s new, what’s different, and what it means for you.

Speakers: Nick Handel, Director, Product Management, dbt Labs; Roxi Pourzand, Product Manager, dbt Labs

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

On Survivor, it's all fun and games until someone fails and a challenge is lost. People scramble, they frantically search for hidden immunity idols (and sometimes even crazier things happen).

Within data teams, everything is fine until that one Slack alert comes in about a failed run. Chaos doesn't need to ensue between analytics and data engineers when triaging an error with the warehouse or upstream infrastructure. Order fulfillment? Orders are initiated by a user in a web app. Fraud detection? The logic is usually based on ML models that require training and testing. Workflows are connected, making disparate systems a necessity to connect.

The keys to success on Survivor, and on data teams: create links to find hidden immunity idols—I mean, the root cause of why a workflow failed.

Run double duty during this talk: learn about Survivor social science and how to bridge the gap between analytics and data engineering beyond the warehouse for a one-happy-family feeling.

Speaker: Sarah Krasnik Bedell, Growth Lead, Prefect

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

In this session, Boris Jabes explores common challenges faced by data teams when attempting to generate revenue for their company. He delves into issues such as lack of alignment with business objectives, inadequate data quality, and insufficient communication among stakeholders. He provides actionable insights and best practices to help data teams overcome these hurdles and become key drivers of revenue growth.

Speaker: Boris Jabes, CEO & Co-Founder, Census

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

Just like teachers help people understand concepts better, data analysts help business stakeholders understand their company's data. This overlap means that data analysts can take advantage of the same tools teachers use.

Bloom's taxonomy is a helpful pedagogical tool to break the process of encouraging understanding and data literacy into manageable steps. Faith will share three examples of how her data team has used Bloom's taxonomy to improve data literacy, helping to bridge the gap between the data team and business stakeholders.

Speaker: Faith Lierheimer, Data Analyst, Parsyl

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

Learn how ClickUp uses dbt, dbt packages, and Snowflake to save on storage and compute costs using Slim CI and how they empower a data warehouse centric culture across Sales, Marketing, Product Growth, Finance, and RevOps all while maintaining one monolithic dbt build job.

Speaker: Michael Revelo, Data Platform Lead , ClickUp

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

Data engineers build critical pipelines that underpin the computational infrastructure that powers our global economy. Analytics engineers translate impossibly complex business semantics into precise frameworks that give modern companies digital eyes and ears, making them the most agile and responsive organizations ever created. Data scientists find revolutionary truths among vast expanses of noise and distraction, unearthing tiny diamonds in endless mines of numerical dirt.

This talk isn’t about any of that.

This talk is about commas. It’s about capitalization. It’s about indentation. It’s about the tedious arguments that no sensible person should ever care about, but we, as data people, can’t seem to resist. It’s about indulging in our unhinged debates, analyzing data on billions of queries, and giving us all a reason to bury our flag a bit deeper into whatever petty hill we’ve each chosen to die on. Let the good times roll.

Will it tell us anything useful? No. Will there be slides that you can take pictures of to show your leadership team why your role is valuable? Absolutely not. But there will be lots of charts , graphs , and misplaced commas.

Speaker: Benn Stancil, CTO, Mode

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

The Fivetran Analytics Engineering team strives to make its dbt packages multi-faceted enough and functional for the majority of data teams, balancing flexibility against ease of implementation. This means that the packages should get you 80% of the way there out of the box, but you're not alone as you cover the final 20%!

Over the years, the team has further developed its understanding of the nuances of analyses and developed different methods for folks to easily tweak packages to their liking. This session will discuss passthrough columns, union macros, and overriding package models, and will teach you how to use these features to make Fivetran's packages work for you or even leverage the same patterns in your own work.

Speaker: Jamie Rodriguez, Senior Analytics Engineer, Fivetran

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

A significant proportion of dbt Cloud users do not have a dbt CI job set up. Among those who do, many don’t leverage powerful functionality like state comparison and deferral to implement Slim CI, likely causing teams to miss errors and building unnecessary tables. Setting up Slim CI in dbt Cloud can be especially challenging for larger-scale data organizations who have multiple data environments, git branches, and targets. Watch this session to learn how you can build and evolve a strong, lasting data environment using Slim CI.

Speakers: Leo Folsom, Solutions Engineer, Datafold

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

In this session, phData talks through their experiences dealing with migrations: how to plan for one, how to handle refactoring code, and the difficulty of auditing. This session is especially helpful for organizations that are looking to transition to dbt Cloud, as it provides helpful tips for laying the foundations for a new system and doing the migration right.

Speakers: Dakota Kelley, Solution Architect, phData; Chris Johnson, Solutions Architect, phData

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

Performance is a crucial factor in delivering timely and accurate data to organizations. However, debugging the performance of dbt models can be a challenge, as most resources available focus on legacy databases or tips for specific data engines that do not translate to modern data platforms.

In this talk, Juan Manuel Perafan focuses on optimizing performance for dbt users, without focusing on any specific data warehouse. He explores the commonalities across most data warehouses and provides practical tips and strategies for improving the performance of dbt models. From query optimization to materialization strategies.

Whether you're new to dbt or a seasoned user, this talk provides valuable insights and best practices for improving the performance of your dbt models.

Speaker: Juan Manuel Perafan, Analytics Engineer, Xebia

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

This session walks through Fleetio’s 1.5-year metrics modernization journey: from legacy spreadsheet → custom metric spec and streamlit UI → migrating to dbt-metrics → evolving the metric explorer to become a data portal.

The Fleetio team elaborates on how their thinking of metrics evolved from both a business and technical perspective and how they’re building their metrics explorer to become the frontpage of the data team.

Speakers: Jeffrey Chen, Director of Data & Analytics , Fleetio; Jonathan Hollinger. Senior Data Engineer, Fleetio

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

Ever feel like a soloist in a cacophony of data players? Join Intuitive Surgical's journey from data silos to a harmonized data symphony with dbt as the conductor. Under the spotlight of robotic-assisted surgery, dbt enabled their data teams to provide analytics across a diverse 3000+ engineering organization. Chris Nourse delves into Intuitive's innovations in surgical robotics. Then Brice Loustau discusses their implementation of "dbt-as-a-Service" and multi-project orchestration, while ensuring a scalable, automated, and regulatory-compliant environment.

Speakers: Brice Loustau, Software Engineer, Intuitive Surgical; Christopher Nourse, Analytics Engineer, Intuitive Surgical

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

In the past year at Whatnot, the team has watched their dbt project grow from three developers and fewer than 50 models, to 50 developers and more than 1000 models. In this talk, Alice Leach, a data engineer at Whatnot, discusses the knowledge the team has acquired during this time and the solutions they have built to address the challenges that come with scaling projects. This is broken down into three “G”s: guard rails (robust CI/ CD processes, model monitoring and automated clean up); guidelines (modular workspaces, macros and documentation); and gadgets (dbt code generation and the operations and hooks in place to allow the dbt project to interface with other tools).

Speaker: Alice Leach, Data Engineer, Whatnot

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

Business processes are the foundation of any organization, directing entities towards achieving specific outcomes. These processes can be simple or complex and may take days or even months to complete. Insights into business processes can be determined through three categories: occurrence, volume, and velocity.

In this presentation, Routable’s Director of Data & Analytics discusses the technical and process complexities involved in creating data models in a data warehouse using dbt Cloud. The session also provides tips to make the process easier and explains how to expose this data to users using Looker.

Speaker: Jason Hodson, Director, Data & Analytics, Routable

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

In this session, you'll learn about Rebtel's migration journey from a legacy architecture to the modern data stack. Due to the challenges of Rebtel's stack, the data product value was decreasing in the company, it was time to migrate. Learn how the team is using dbt Cloud and Snowflake to achieve greater success in delivering value to the business. You'll leave with a richer understanding of how to plan and execute a legacy migration.

Speaker: Quentin Coviaux, Data Engineer, Rebtel

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

Hear how the data team at Element Biosciences is tackling BI sprawl while rapidly scaling data models using dbt. They share three use cases along with the tools that enabled their teams to align on crucial metrics to make data-driven decisions and unlock tangible business benefits.

Speaker: Matthew Hoss, Sr. Manager, Business Systems, Element Biosciences

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

At the beginning of this year, Cityblock Health was afforded a unique opportunity: to rebuild their existing dbt project from scratch.

Launched in mid-2019, the legacy project had grown organically into a tangled mess of 1800+ models, with further development becoming more and more difficult.

Faced with the challenge of retroactively imposing order on the existing project, their leadership gave them the opportunity to start fresh instead.

They jumped at the chance, and began applying many of the lessons they learned at Coalesce 2022 to set the new project up for success: - SQL linting, with SQLFluff - YAML linting, with yamllint - dbt best practices, with dbt-checkpoint and dbt-project-evaluator

As a result, this core project has become the model for multi-project collaboration at Cityblock. Rather than a single monolithic project, the new state features a collection of smaller projects, each governed by a high bar for code quality.

Speakers: Katie Claiborne, Staff analytics engineer, Cityblock Health; Nathaniel Burren, Analytics Engineer, Cityblock Health

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

Would you like to know how one of the largest online business insurance organizations in Australia saves 36-72 engineering hours per connector? Watch this session to see how you can influence your business to make quicker and more accurate insights into key business metrics.

Speakers: Alexandra Coffey, Account Executive, Fivetran; Jimmo Vink, Head of Information Management, BizCover

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

The final session of Coalesce 2023! Join us for Community Awards and closing thoughts. We recognize 10 individuals who have contributed significantly to the success of the dbt Community. Some of them will be with us in person, and some others will be tuning in online. All Community Award recipients are recognized and presented with a unique, never-before-seen swag item!

After the awards, we end with closing thoughts and announce the location for Coalesce 2024!

Speakers: Amada Echeverría, Global Community Lead, dbt Labs; Tristan Handy, CEO, dbt Labs

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

When companies work together through open source development, good things happen. Open source contributions lead to strong relationships between engineers across company lines, and positive outcomes for customers whether through improved functionality, performance, or supply chain security. In this keynote, learn about the power of open source in driving innovation, how AWS approaches open source collaboration, and some of the key improvements for Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, and Amazon Athena customers and dbt users resulting from our partnership.

Speaker: David Nalley, Director, Open Source Strategy and Marketing, Amazon Web Services

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

Join Snowflake & Deloitte as they discuss how organizations can become exponential enterprise ready through the power of the Snowflake Data Cloud and dbt Cloud's ability to write, test, and ship reliable data in quick time. This session updates you on what your organization needs to do to become exponential enterprise ready. This session also shares examples of organizations that have already made the successful transformation and why they are winning in the market with dbt, Deloitte and Snowflake.

Speakers: Mathew Zele, Cloud & ISV Lead, Snowflake; Vivek Pradhan Lead Partner - Data and AI Platforms , Deloitte; Sagar Kulkarni Partner Sales Engineer, Snowflake

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

ChatGPT is the talk of the town, with everyone asking - are the robots finally coming for our jobs? Join this panel of data leaders to hear about why they believe that ChatGPT and other AI tools are actually an analytical engineer's new best friend.

Speakers: Kate Schiffelbein, Head of Business Intelligence, Northbeam; Lindsay Murphy, Head of Data, Secoda; Patrick Ross, Solutions Architect, Data Clymer

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

Lauren Benezra has been volunteering with a local cat rescue since 2018. She recently took on the challenge of rebuilding their data stack from scratch, replacing a Jenga tower of incomprehensible Google Sheets with a more reliable system backed by the Modern Data Stack. By using Airtable, Airbyte, BigQuery, dbt Cloud and Census, her role as Foster Coordinator has transformed: instead of digging for buried information while wrangling cats, she now serves up accurate data with ease while... well... wrangling cats.

Viewers will learn that it's possible to run an extremely scalable and reliable stack on a shoestring budget, and will come away with actionable steps to put Lauren's hard-won lessons into practice in their own volunteering projects or as the first data hire in a tiny startup.

Speakers: Lauren Benezra, Senior Analytics Engineer, dbt Labs

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