Day 2 of DBT Coalesce 2022 got underway with very impressive New Orleans Mardi Gras marching band pushing through the second floor of the hotel conference center. Very exciting, very loud, very New Orleans.
Our very own Mike Jelen was able to get some time with the DBT Team to answer some questions behind camera. We’ll update the post when the DBT footage goes live on their site/social media.
There were lots of great presentations so our team did our best to divide and digest, so we can bring our clients who couldn’t attend the conference all the latest learnings, best practices, and commentary from other DBT experts like us from around the world.
The Keynote was probably the highlight of the day. How DBT has amassed an amazing centralization in the data and analytics world is not small feat. As a vehicle to working with data transformation is hub of DBT-Core and natural managed extension of DBT-Cloud allows it to spoke into a stronger ecosystem by a radius that is only as far as any customers appetite for data and analytics can reach. The keynote shows how DBT Labs is taking advantage of that position by announcing a few new products:
- Ptyhnon Support in DBT
- A much anticipated (and needed) dbt Cloud IDE
- and, the dbt Semantic Layer
Obviously our team is hyper excited about the Semantic Layer. An more from us this coming quarter on how we’re using the dbt Semantic Layer to bridge some amazing legacy data and BI tech to the new modern data stack
A few session worth noting were (and we’ll post links here if dbt Coalesce posts to youtube or the sort):
- Rand Pitcher with things not to do in dbt (dbt Labs)
- David Jayatillake with the return on analytics engineering (Metaplane)
- Elize Papineau and Dave Connors with dbt Packages you didn’t know you needed (dbt Labs)
- Lindsay Murphy and John Kennedy on the ‘easy way’ to launch analytics at a startup with dbt (Maple)
- Emily Ritter on ‘but my number says this’ (Mode)
Although there were many other amazing sessions on the docket for Day 2 these seemed to be highlights from our team.
A theme that I think we’re seeing at this years dbt Coalesce conference are a lot of fresh faces and new freshly minted data engineers that are finding the joy in SQL, a bit differently that many of us 20+ year SQL veterans, by joy all the same. Or perhaps we were all once so wide-eyed when we heard our first few “SQL” jokes, and just had to laugh at the corny by play punning of this staple language in this/our profession of turning data into valuable information.
The day concluded in a similar boisterous way that it started by every at 6pm marching through the main thoroughfare with the Mardi Gras marching band.