As Joe Reis recently opined, if you want to know what’s next in data engineering, just look at the software engineer. The MDS-in-a-box pattern has been a game changer for applying software engineering principles to local data development– improving the ability to share data, collaborate on modeling work and data analysis the same way we build and share open source tooling.

This panel brings together experts in data engineering, data analytics and software engineering to explore the current state of the pattern, pieces that remain missing today and how emerging tools and data engineering testing capabilities can refine the transition from local development to production workflows.

Speakers: Matt Housley, CTO, Halfpipe Systems; Mehdi Ouazza, Developer Advocate, MotherDuck; Sung Won Chung, Solutions Engineer, Datafold; Louise de Leyritz, Host, The Data Couch podcast

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In this session, Yijun Cao and Dakota Kelley highlight how dbt plays a key role in MuleSoft’s modern data analytics framework. As MuleSoft continues to grow, the data platform engineering team encountered some challenges with the data transformations. The session dives deeper into the specific challenges faced by the team and demonstrates how dbt’s features including CI/CD, testing, documentation and lineage help overcome these challenges.

Speakers: Yijun Cao, Data Platform Engineer, Salesforce; Dakota Kelley, Solution Architect, phData

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In this session, learn how Prime Therapeutics' data team was able to implement dbt for multiple teams and environments in a highly-controlled way without compromising security or performance. With multiple teams and environments, it was essential to manage and maintain consistent policies across environments while helping share best practices to improve their dbt implementations.

Speakers: Jill Aakhus, Principal Analytics Engineer, Prime Therapeutics; Anubhav Pareek, Data Analytics Engineer, AICG

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

As analytics engineers, we know that getting the data model right is crucial for successful data analytics. However, communicating requirements and needs can be a challenge, especially for junior data team members. After noticing too many post-PR revisions and missed requirements, Wellthy began developing a communication framework that has helped streamline and clarify the requirements gathering process for new models.

Their framework is designed to help analysts visualize and anticipate what they need from a dataset, resulting in a more efficient and effective data modeling process for the analytics engineer. In this talk, Kelly Pook shares Wellthy's experiences and best practices using these frameworks, as well as the benefits seen in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and time savings.

Speaker: Kelly Pook, Senior Analytics Engineer, Wellthy

In this session, you'll learn tips and tricks from La-Z-Boy on how to modernize infrastructure and tackle complex retail and manufacturing data problems using dbt and Fivetran. Hear from a data leader about their experience and how you can replicate their success. Start your session off with some comfortable data movements to make sure you can extract as much information as possible from our loaded session on data transformation.

Speakers: Alex Hauer, Lead Product Marketing Manager, Fivetran; Selwyn Samuel, Director of Data Analytics & Enterprise Architecture, La-Z-Boy

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Advances in LLM technology and the semantic layer have made AI-powered data analytics easy. Nothing special. Par for the course.

Wait, you haven't seen yet? Don't worry, we'll show you. But I gotta warn you, it's pretty boring stuff. You just ask for whatever data you want, and then the computer gets it for you. Yes, seriously!

So what is still impressive in October 2023? Well, good old fashioned human ingenuity and improvisational skill. Computers may have gotten pretty good at crunching the numbers, but you still can't replace good old fashioned meat and bone when it comes time to present those numbers to the big boss.

In this session, Izzy Miller and Matt David put that to the test with a live game of Dashboard Karaoke— with an AI twist. Random audience members take turns using Hex's Magic AI to generate entire analytical reports on datasets of their choosing. Then, our handpicked data practitioners have to improvise a compelling presentation of the results on the spot, explaining the intricacies and trends of data they've never seen. And of course, there will be plenty of time for audience questions ;)

Speakers: Izzy Miller, Developer Advocate, Hex; Matt David, Product Marketing Lead, Hex

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