This panel discussion led by Data Clymer brings together data leaders from some of the top professional sports organizations in the U.S. to explore how sports and similar mid-size businesses are leveraging data and analytics engineering best practices to fuel revenue growth, improve business efficiencies, and drive fan engagement.

Speakers: Jesse McCabe, Vice President Marketing, Data Clymer; Keelan Smithers, Data Product Manager, Analytics Engineering, NBA; Paimon Jaberi, Managing Director of Strategy and Analytics, Seattle Seahawks; Jared Chavez, Senior Data Engineer, Pacers Sports & Entertainment

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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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Artyom Keydunov, Co-founder & CEO of Cube, discusses the future for the semantic layer, uniting BI tools, embedded analytics, and AI agents. This new approach brings together data, enabling data tools to introspect data model definitions and seamlessly interoperate within the data stack. By embracing this new approach—data practitioners will reap the benefits with enhanced user experiences, quicker data delivery, and streamlined workloads. See how a semantic layer can harmonize your data tools to drive maximum impact for yourself and end-users.

Speaker: Artyom Keydunov, Co-founder & CEO, Cube Dev

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Two public servants at the City of Boston and the State of California are tasked with improving data services and data engineering practices within their respective governments. As part of the modernization process, they are adopting dbt and associated tools within their respective teams.

This session discusses the similarities and differences between the implementations of dbt, and how some of the constraints and challenges of working in government shape both the technical and social design of data services. The speakers will reflect on successes, challenges, and lessons learned about adopting modern data tooling in state and local governments.

Speakers: Jenna Jordan, Data Engineer, City of Boston; Ian Rose, Senior Data Engineer, California Office of Data and Innovation; Laurie Merrell, Senior Analytics Engineer, Jarvus Innovations

This session addresses the problem of how to leverage dbt Cloud to support domain user development for a migration from a centralized analytics environment towards a distributed data mesh analytics environment.

Speaker: Holly Burch, Data Architect, Sharp HealthCare

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In the rapidly evolving landscape of data technology, the integration of Snowflake and dbt has revolutionized the creation and management of data applications. Now, developers can harness their combined capabilities to build superior, scalable, and sophisticated data applications.

With Snowflake’s cloud-based architecture, developers can access boundless storage, computing, and seamless data sharing. Additionally, Snowpark Python enables the performance of data transformation, analytics, and algorithmic functions within Snowflake, presenting developers with a new realm of opportunities. Incorporating dbt further enhances the synergy, allowing developers to streamline data workflows in an agile, model-driven environment.

This session covers how the Snowflake and dbt partnership can pave the way toward building better, future-proof data applications that cater to the dynamic needs of businesses in the digital era.

Speaker: Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology and Application Partners, Snowflake

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Today's massive datasets represent an unprecedented opportunity for organizations to build data-intensive applications. With this report, product leads, architects, and others who deal with applications and application development will explore why a cloud data platform is a great fit for data-intensive applications. You'll learn how to carefully consider scalability, data processing, and application distribution when making data app design decisions. Cloud data platforms are the modern infrastructure choice for data applications, as they offer improved scalability, elasticity, and cost efficiency. With a better understanding of data-intensive application architectures on cloud-based data platforms and the best practices outlined in this report, application teams can take full advantage of advances in data processing and app distribution to accelerate development, deployment, and adoption cycles. With this insightful report, you will: Learn why a modern cloud data platform is essential for building data-intensive applications Explore how scalability, data processing, and distribution models are key for today's data apps Implement best practices to improve application scalability and simplify data processing for efficiency gains Modernize application distribution plans to meet the needs of app providers and consumers About the authors: Adam Morton works with Intelligen Group, a Snowflake pure-play data and analytics consultancy. Kevin McGinley is technical director of the Snowflake customer acceleration team. Brad Culberson is a data platform architect specializing in data applications at Snowflake.

When a startup is in its early stages, the data infrastructure is typically built with the best intentions, but doesn’t necessarily scale, and often predates many modern data tools available today. Years later, you might find yourself juggling complexity and tech debt when providing insights. This talk shares the journey Unbounce embarked on to modernize their data stack, including approaches to the following hurdles: demonstrating value and ROI to leadership for buy-in; deciding which tools to adopt; coordinating with data engineers and data analysts to deliver the cross-team project; and ensuring there were no interruptions to stakeholders throughout the migration.

Speaker: Morgan Cabot, Analytics engineering technical lead, Unbounce

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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