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/

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/

Bluecore works with the largest retail brands around the world to engage shoppers and keep them coming back. In this talk, you’ll learn how the team at Bluecore went about creating, scaling, and maturing an analytics data warehouse in BigQuery to orchestrate 10,000+ models every 30 minutes without bankrupting the company.

Speakers: Adam Whitaker, Analytics Lead, bluecore; Nicole Dallar-Malburg, Analytics Engineer, Bluecore

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

Surfline uses Segment to collect product analytics events to understand how surfers use their forecasts and live surf cameras across 9000+ surf spots worldwide. An open source tool was developed to define and manage product analytics event schemas using JSON schema which are used to build dbt staging models for all events.

With this solution, the data team has more time to build intermediate and mart models in dbt, knowing that our staging layer fully reflects Surfline’s product analytics events. This presentation is a real-life example on how schemas (or data contracts) can be used as a medium to build consensus, enforce standards, improve data quality, and speed up the dbt workflow for product analytics.

Speaker: Greg Clunies, Senior Analytics Engineer, Surfline

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

Video highlights from Coalesce 2023 in San Diego. Coalesce is a conference for data practitioners, by data practitioners.

Coalesce is hosted by dbt Labs and crafted in collaboration with partners to advance the practice of the analytics engineering industry. Anyone that seeks new tips, tools, or techniques for more impactful data work is welcome to attend.

Sign up for our next Coalesce: https://coalesce.getdbt.com/

Kick off Coalesce at the Keynote and Product Spotlight!

Seven years ago, in the early days of dbt, dbt Labs was building capabilities that made data developers more productive. dbt gained traction. It took off. Today, dbt is the standard for data transformation. It has never been easier to build and ship data products. This has created a new challenge – complexity. Join Tristan Handy, Founder and CEO at dbt Labs, and Luis Maldonado, Vice President of Product at dbt Labs, to hear all about the latest releases in dbt and how they are helping organizations navigate complexity. Finally, you'll hear from data leaders at Fifth Third Bank on how they are implementing these new capabilities in dbt to execute on their data strategy and achieve better outcomes for the business.