Cleartelligence held its second dbt Meetup of the year last Wednesday night at the State Street building in Boston. If you haven't been to one, these events focus on the impact of dbt in the data community and professional development tools for analytics engineers. Participants discuss data stacks, data operations, data teams, modeling, testing, dashboards, and more.
These events do not feature ANY sponsored presentations from dbt Labs, Cleartelligence, providers of the host venues, or speakers. They exist solely to bring a community of data practitioners together. They're casual and inclusive - meant to be informative, helpful, and laid back.
The Venue
Thank you to our friends at Upsolver for sponsoring the meetup's venue - State Street Financial Center. The meeting space was unique and comfortable, with a killer view of the night's thunder and lightning.
About Upsolver
Upsolver is a closely-knit group of data engineers and infrastructure developers who are obsessed with making big data ingestion pipelines so easy to create that any data practitioner could do it, even when dealing with streaming and complex data at big data scale. We built the first version of Upsolver for our own use, and enjoyed eating our own dog food so much that we decided to bring this value to every company doing analytics in the cloud. We now claim numerous companies as customers spanning industries as diverse as oil & gas to gaming, feeding both operational analytics and customer-facing data products.
The Presentations
William Kuan, Senior Data Engineer at Rapid7 kicked things off with his talk "𝗘𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀𝗵 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗱𝗯𝘁: 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀-𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻."
Will discussed the benefits of using dbt in a decentralized approach to managing analytical data in complex and large-scale environments. By distributing data responsibility to those closest to it, this approach encourages agility, innovation, and accountability. With a decentralized platform in dbt, teams can collaborate, self-serve, and work in parallel, leading to more efficient achievement of data-driven goals. This approach empowers teams to take ownership of their data and work with it in a way that suits them, while also facilitating cross-team collaboration and simplifying CICD and workflows.
Check out his slides here:
Sabin Thomas, CTO at ZingData presented his talk "dbt for querying from a phone."
Sabin went over architecture patterns for mobile-first tooling, and the difference in needs for emerging market users for data products. I will also examine using dbt to evaluate SQL query composition patterns and how Zing Data has evolved these patterns to account for mobile first problems - poor connectivity, long running queries, push notifications, location-sensitive query composition and others.
Check out his slides here:
Networking at the dbt Boston Meetup
While the presentations are a big part of these community events, they're far from the only attraction. Despite the uncooperative weather, we had about 50 data engineers in attendance who hung out, talked shop, enjoyed dinner curtesy of Phinix Mediterranean Catering, and even helped the meeting planner troubleshoot the projector (Thank you again, Roy/Jason!) If you were unable to make it out to this meetup, I hope you'll consider joining us for the next. We're targeting September, and are still seeking presenters and host venues for the Q3 offering!
Want to Host or Present at the Next dbt Boston Meetup?
If you'd be interested in hosting or presenting at a future Meetup, please don't hesitate to reach out to me or Chitra Sundaram. If it's your first time speaking, don't worry! Our team will help you with your topic and content and support you along the way. We’re committed to building an inclusive community and are looking forward to elevating diverse perspectives, people, and backgrounds regardless of race, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or disability.
How to Get More Involved in the dbt Community
➡️ Join the dbt Slack community: https://www.getdbt.com/community/
🤝🏽 Be part of the conversation in the #local-boston channel in dbt Slack! This is where the chat will also take place during meetups.
About dbt
dbt™ is a SQL-first transformation workflow that lets teams quickly and collaboratively deploy analytics code following software engineering best practices like modularity, portability, CI/CD, and documentation. Now anyone on the data team can safely contribute to production-grade data pipelines.
Learn more about our relationship with dbt Labs and service offerings.