Belgium dbt Meetup #3 (in-person)

The 3th edition of the Belgium dbt Meetup will take place in Brussels on September 28th.

dbt Meetups are networking events open to all folks working with data! Talks predominantly focus on community members' experience with dbt, however, you'll catch presentations on broader topics such as analytics engineering, data stacks, data ops, modeling, testing, and team structures.

🏠Venue Host: Astrafy, Silversquare Delta, Av. Arnaud Fraiteur 15, Ixelles
🤝Organizers: Charles Verleyen & Sam Debruyn

To attend, please read the Required Participation Language for In-Person Events with dbt Labs: https://bit.ly/3QIJXFb

Our venue has capacity limits, so please only RSVP if you intend to come and reach out send a message in #local-belgium on Slack if
you need to cancel last minute or change your RSVP status on the Meetup to "Not Going."

📝Agenda:

• 17h45: welcome with food & drinks
• 18h30: Why dbt will one day be bigger than Spark - Kris Peeters, CEO at Data Minded
• 19h15: Bring your own compute: benefits & pitfalls of developing analytics with DuckDB - Frederik Druyts, Consultant at Datashift
• 19h45: break
• 20h: Speed up ML development with python models in dbt - Dorian Van den Heede, Machine Learning Engineer at Dataroots
• 20h45: networking & drinks

🗣Presentation #1: Why dbt will one day be bigger than Spark - Kris Peeters, CEO at Data Minded
In this talk, I will discuss how the data world is moving from distributed processing frameworks like Spark to more high-level tooling like dbt. It is based on a blog I wrote more than 2 years ago, and we see the transition happen today: https://medium.com/datamindedbe/why-dbt-will-one-day-be-bigger-than-spark-2225cadbdad0

Kris is the founder and CEO of Data Minded. We serve large enterprises and growing startups by designing, building and running data initiatives in the cloud.

🗣Presentation #2: Bring your own compute: benefits & pitfalls of developing analytics with DuckDB - Frederik Druyts, Consultant at Datashift
When was the last time you really needed that 16-machine cluster to quickly check an assumption about your data while writing a new model? Developers often have powerful machines sitting right on their desks, though they rarely use any of that power when doing analytics engineering.

In this session, we will explore how we can leverage DuckDB to efficiently fetch data from cloud storage and build, explore, and test a data model all from a local environment. We will discuss the benefits and pitfalls of this approach, including how it can help us reduce the cost and complexity of our analytics engineering efforts, as well as its potential limitations.

Frederik is skilled at designing, implementing and maintaining end-to-end data solutions. As an analytical mind with a heart for technology, he wants to help the right people ask the right questions and get the right answers from data they can trust. He achieves impact on the intersection of grasping business needs, mastering toolsets both time-tested and new, and writing clean SQL.

🗣Presentation #3: Speed up ML development with python models in dbt - Dorian Van den Heede, Machine Learning Engineer at Dataroots
In this talk, Dorian will share his experience on do's and don'ts of python models within dbt for ML and demonstrate a few design patterns to speed up development responsibly within dbt.
While SQL is still the preferred language within dbt, python models bring more expressive power to your transformation pipelines. Exactly what we want and need as machine learning engineers for our data preparation! You can go even further to defining your entire ML production pipeline within dbt, inference included.

Dorian (28y) is a Machine Learning Engineer at Dataroots. With his background in Computer Science Engineering and 5 years of experience at multiple clients, bringing machine learning models to production according to software best practices is what he thrives at. Aside of that, he was involved in the AI music band Beatroots, writes punk rock songs on his guitar and can be found blitzing chess moves online.

➡️ Join the dbt Slack community: https://www.getdbt.com/community/
🤝 For the best Meetup experience, make sure to join the #local-belgium channel in dbt Slack (https://slack.getdbt.com/)!

dbt is a data transformation framework that lets analysts and engineers collaborate using their shared knowledge of SQL. Through the application of software engineering best practices like modularity, version control, testing, and documentation, dbt’s analytics engineering workflow helps teams work more efficiently to produce data the entire organization can trust.

Learn more: https://www.getdbt.com/