Current data testing practices—meticulously testing individual models and methods—are not only outdated but also costly and inefficient. In this talk, Aiven challenges this traditional approach, which they argue accumulates unnecessary technical debt and inflates warehousing costs without improving data quality.

Speakers: Anton Heikinheimo Senior Data Engineer Aiven

Emiel Verkade Senior Analytics Engineer Aiven

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Want to learn more about dbt Cloud’s cross-platform mesh vision? Want to brainstorm how open table formats are of value to analytics engineers? Want to talk with peers who are considering or scoping how to use dbt and lakehouses to orchestrate workloads across platforms to solve business problems?

In this peer exchange, participants talk with peers and think through any and all of the above.

Speakers: Anders Swanson I serve the realm dbt Labs

Ulrik Svanborg Møller Lead Data Engineer Vestas Wind Systems

William Krill Data Engineer Vestas Wind Systems

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

A migration story with the underlying philosophy, and strategic approach to move from a low-code ETL tool like Alteryx to a modern data engineering mindset with dbt. This transition is not just about adopting new tools but embracing a code-first philosophy that promotes best practices in software engineering, such as modularity, reusability, and transparency.

Speakers: Somnath Chatterjee Lead Data Engineer Cox Automotive

Brett Darcy Lead Software Engineer Cox Automotive

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

This session will detail Pacific Life’s strategic transition to advanced data platforms, dbt and Snowflake. It will provide a comprehensive overview of the challenges encountered, the strategies employed to overcome them, and the significant advantages gained through this transformation.

Speakers: Trang Do Data Engineer Excellence Pacific Life

Jacob Emerson Data Engineer Pacific Life

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

This session will cover the before and after of the Eleanor Health analytics architecture story moving from dbt Core to dbt Cloud. As a part of it, it will also go over our foundational architectural principles and design patterns that helped us create a new Analytics Layer that increased productivity for our analysts.

Speaker: Scott Parent Director, Data & Analytics Eleanor Health

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

As part of a rapid modernization initiative, USAA Property and Casualty migrated from a legacy, GUI-based ETL tool and on-prem servers to dbt Cloud and a cloud database. Adopting dbt Cloud enabled near real time data delivery, but dbt Python models opened the door to dependency management. In this session, USAA shares how to go fast and manage vulnerabilities.

Speakers: Kit Alderson USAA Data Engineer, CI/CD Wizard USAA

Ted Douglass Senior Data Engineer USAA

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

AI is changing software engineering, and it will change analytics too. Come for a glimpse of the day-to-day job of an analyst in the future, and some strategies for how to maximally benefit from AI.

Speaker: Bryan Bischof Head of AI Hex

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

In this talk, we will make the case that the success of enterprise AI depends on an investment in semantics and knowledge, not just data. Our LLM Accuracy benchmark research provided evidence that by layering semantic layers/knowledge graphs on enterprise SQL databases increases the accuracy of LLMs at least 4X for question answering. This work has been reproduced and validated by many others, including dbt labs. It's fantastic that semantics and knowledge are getting the attention it deserves. We need more.

This talk is targeted to 1) those who believe AI accuracy can be improved by simply adding more data to fine-tune/train models, and 2) the believers in semantics and knowledge who need help getting executive buy-in.

We will dive into: - the knowledge engineering work that needs to be done - who should be leading this work (hint: analytics engineers) - what companies lose by not doing this knowledge engineering work

Speaker: Juan Sequeda Principal Scientist and Head of AI Lab data.world

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Despite the popularity of ML as a technical solution, there are few resources on the practical aspects of deploying your first ML model. This talk covers Figma’s journey from ideation to post launch: how we decided to invest, how we designed and built our first pipeline with dbt, what we wish we did differently on the way to production, and what came after our first launch.

Speaker: Emily Jia Data Scientist Figma

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Join us as we share our journey of migrating from dbt Core to dbt Cloud. We'll discuss why we made this shift – focusing on security, ownership, and standardization. Starting with separate team-based projects on dbt Core, we moved towards a unified structure, and eventually embraced dbt Cloud. Now, all teams follow a common structure and standardized requirements, ensuring better security and collaboration.

In our session, we'll explore how we improved our data analytics processes by migrating from dbt Core to dbt Cloud. Initially, each team had its way of working on dbt Core, leading to security risks and inconsistent practices. To address this, we transitioned to a more unified approach on dbt Core. This year we migrated dbt Cloud, which allowed us to centralize our data analytics workflows, enhancing security and promoting collaboration.

For scheduling we manage our own Airflow instance using AWS EKS. We use Datahub as data catalog.

Key points: Enhanced Security: dbt Cloud provided robust security features, helping us safeguard our data pipelines. Ownership and Collaboration: With dbt Cloud, teams took ownership of their projects while collaborating more effectively. Standardization: We enforced standardized requirements across all projects, ensuring consistency and efficiency, using dbt-project-evaluator.

Speakers: Alejandro Ivanez Platform Engineer DPG Media

Mathias Lavaert Principal Platform Engineer DPG Media

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

There is a lot of talk when it comes to how LLMs can best be deployed in the analytics space. What are implementation best practices? Are LLMs best suited with text-to-SQL or with a Semantic Layer underneath providing proper constraints?

These are fun discussions to have, but LLMs also present a massive opportunity for companies beyond normal analytics work. The team at Newfront has been building LLM-powered products for clients that are external facing, using a cross-functional group that consists of many data team members.

In this talk, they'll go over where data professionals fit best in building these sorts of products and how to get started in participating in direct value generation for your business.

Speaker: Patrick Miller Head of Data & AI Newfront

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Entities, dimensions, and metrics. These things play crucial roles in allowing companies to create meaningful pictures of their data.

Max has spent the last 2.5 years using dbt with two different cleantech startups, experience he draws on to inform his approach to the challenge of matching and maintaining entities for more robust semantics. This talk will delve into the practical aspects of using the dbt Semantic Layer and Dot an LLM Slack plugin to provide matched insights directly to team members at Topanga.io.

Expect to learn about best practices in self-service, LLMs, data governance, and how to leverage the dbt Semantic Layer effectively. It’s a session geared toward beginners, intermediates, and pros alike

Speaker: Max Richman Head of Data and Financial Analysis Topanga.io

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

AI is transforming data development and engagement at ClickUp. By working to integrate AI at every stage—from data ingestion and transformation and even down to customer-facing systems—ClickUp is at the forefront. A key component of this initiative is a multi-step process to implement a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system. This involves several strategic steps, including an AI-integrated IDE for development and an in-house application designed to offer unique insights into the data stack, fully aligned with business operations. This approach simplifies information retrieval and streamlines processes for internal data teams and stakeholders. Join us to explore ClickUp’s approach to AI development and discover the benefits of AI in the data industry.

Speaker: Collin Lenon Senior Analytics Engineer ClickUp

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Have you ever wanted to build an AI chatbot to query your data platform? Transforming a business user's natural language question into a valid SQL query that answers their question has huge potential to unlock improved self-service analytics. However, even state-of-the-art LLMs are prone to hallucination, which makes it hard to generate SQL queries that are both conceptually and syntactically correct.

In this talk, you'll learn how the team at M1 Finance tackled this problem using MetricFlow’s rich semantic modeling along with LLM-based tool invocation. This approach enables them to reliably produce valid SQL queries from natural language questions, avoiding issues of hallucination or incorrect metrics.

Speakers: Kelly Wolinetz Senior Data Engineer M1 Finance

Brady Dauzat Machine Learning Engineer M1

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Learn best practices, challenges, and outcomes the NBA experienced as they scaled from zero to 35 monthly active contributors to their dbt Cloud project over the course of one year. Keelan will review the state of analytics before dbt, and how widespread adoption has resulted in improved uptime, time to value, and organizational trust in data. He'll share specifics of the challenges faced, and how they were able to implement best practices and new organizational norms at various stages of the journey to combat these workflow and cultural hurdles. He'll also share the frameworks he and his team built and standardized on as they democratized data analytics to dozens of practitioners, and how they capitalized on small pockets of "ah-ha!" moments to translate it into lasting behavioral change.

Speaker: Keelan Smithers Data Product Manager, Analytics Engineering NBA

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

In the rapidly evolving landscape of data management, a multi-data platform strategy is essential for organizations seeking to harness the full potential of their diverse data sources. Learn how Fox uses dbt Cloud as a pivotal technology in orchestrating this strategy, enabling seamless integration, transformation, and analysis across multiple data platforms.

Speaker: Ramesh Madepalli Sr. Director, Architecture and Strategy Fox Corporation

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

This session will cover all things Tableau and the dbt Semantic Layer. Gordon will show you how to configure and connect to the dbt Semantic Layer in Tableau. He will address the differences between using the semantic layer with Tableau Server and Desktop - in particular how the semantic layer can help eliminate tech debt on Tableau Server. There will also be a deep dive into best practices - for instance, how and why saved queries are such a powerful semantic layer feature for Tableau users.

Speakers: Madeline Lee Product Manager, Tableau

Gordon Rose Principal Solutions Architect dbt Labs

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Self-serve! Genuine self-serve. The data team at the Philadelphia Inquirer has made crucial strides toward enabling it for their business users, with the dbt Semantic Layer playing a major role. Their journey started with a strong opinion on what self-serve is not. Hear about their journey, the obstacles they overcame along the way, and the outcomes they were able to drive in this talk.

Speaker: Brian Waligorski Lead Data Engineer The Philadelphia Inquirer

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Join Collin as he shares learnings and best practices for scaling dbt on ClickUp's journey as the company rapidly grew from 100 to over 1,000 employees (without losing too much hair). This session is ideal for both new and experienced developers, at any stage of their scaling journey. He'll delve into very practical steps for setting up a robust development environment—covering everything from project structure and IDE setups to advanced CI/CD processes. He'll also share practical learnings, hands-on examples, and best practices for implementing various dbt capabilities as well as tradeoffs his team faced as they balanced cost and business impact at rapid scale.

Speaker: Collin Lenon Senior Analytics Engineer ClickUp

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements

Learn how Hostinger, a leading European provider of web hosting solutions, leverages dbt to implement slowly changing dimensions (SCD)...and not go bankrupt while doing it at scale. They'll cover how they used the Debezium connector to tackle the challenges of change data capture (CDC), and how leveraging dynamic incremental predicates allowed them to scale their solution at a fraction of the cost using BigQuery.

Speakers: Augustinas Karvelis Analytics Engineer Hostinger

Valentinas Mitalauskas Analytics Engineering Lead Hostinger

Read the blog to learn about the latest dbt Cloud features announced at Coalesce, designed to help organizations embrace analytics best practices at scale https://www.getdbt.com/blog/coalesce-2024-product-announcements