Belgium dbt Meetup #5 (in-person)

The 5th edition of the Belgium dbt Meetup will take place in Hasselt on January 25th.

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: Digital Hive, Hendrik van Veldekesingel 150, 3500 Hasselt
🤝Organizers: Wim Deca & 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: start presentations
• 20h30: networking & drinks

🗣️Presentations:

Streamlining unit testing in dbt: Increasing coverage with the least amount of effort
Unit testing of data transformations has long been a cumbersome process. In this talk I'll discuss the goals (and frustrations) we had that led us to look for the most streamlined way to implement unit tests, as well as how we got to our current approach.

Wim Deca
Data Architect at Digital Hive
Wim has been working with data since the beginning of the 2010s and is one of the driving forces behind Digital Hive's Data Unit, a small consulting boutique shop that specializes in engineering and architecture expertise for the modern data stack.

Reigniting Data Modeling: Sensible Strategies for the 2020s and Beyond
This talk covers theoretical and practical learnings from Niko's journey to productize data modeling best practices into performant dbt code, across major data warehouses. In this talk Niko will cover long forgotten data modeling best practices, as well as design you can apply to your own dbt projects. Be prepared: This is not going to be jaffle shop but instead we’ll dive to the deep end with incrementality, temporality and event ledgers. All whilst not blowing up your compute costs. Niko will also share practical learnings on how to build agile data processes in DWH centric setup.

Niko Korvenlaita
CTO, Co-Founder at reconfigured
Niko Korvenlaita, a seasoned data pro for a decade, with experience ranging from Excel to YouTube scale data setups. Currently building reconfigured - a data modeling platform that enables data pros to convert business logic into production-grade dbt code.

Using dbt to lower BigQuery costs
In this session I'd like to share how I used dbt in different ways to lower BigQuery costs in various projects. This includes:
- Cost guardrail techniques with max_bytes_billed, batch jobs and max_concurrency
- Cost observability with job labels & smart usage of information_schemas
- Cost lowering with partitioning, clustering and materialized views

Rik Pauwels
Data Architect at Devoteam G Cloud
I'm a Data Architect at Devoteam G Cloud with a specialisation in Data Warehouses & Customer Data Platforms on BigQuery.
Over the past years I helped multiple big organisations in setting up their own data platform on Google Cloud, this included training, the creation of new pipelines and extensive reviews with respect to cost and security.
Next to that I'm also the proud possessor of all Google Cloud Certificates as well as being recognized as an Google Cloud Authorized Trainer.

We are always looking for speakers!

To submit a session for one of the next meetups, please use our Sessionize page.
Are you in doubt if you're ready to give a talk? Check out dbt Labs's guide on how to deliver a fantastic presentation!

➡️ 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/