Johnny Winter

Despite claims to the contrary, dimensional modelling and star schemas are alive and well the in the modern data world. But whilst developers might have great technical skills and understand how to build a star schema, they may lack the business domain knowledge to ensure that what they deliver is fit for use by analysts and self-service users. On the flip side, these end users often know what they want and need from a data platform, but struggle to explain this in a way that makes it easy for developers to implement. How can we improve the requirements gathering process to make sure we avoid the tensions that can arise from this? This session will cover a data modelling requirements approach that looks to bridge the gap between business and IT by using an end-to-end process for working with business users to collaboratively design a dimensional model, making sure you build super star schemas and turn your self into a data modelling superstar.

Understanding organisational strategies can be difficult, translating those organisational strategies into a supporting data strategy and tangible deliverables is even more so. In this course on Practical Agile Data Product Design, we’ll use a fictional company to understand its organisational strategy, how data can support it, and how to distil and deliver value – taking the high-level of what an organisation wants to achieve and creating tangible data products that support it. From understanding the organisational strategy, identifying domains, understanding domain activities and prioritising them against the strategy, identifying and mapping the events, through to building a backlog to ensure that the first iteration of a data product delivers value immediately. Our comprehensive agenda includes the following highlights: - Relevance of Data Modelling: Uncover why data modelling remains essential in the era of big data. - Data Product Thinking: Understand what a data product is and how Product Thinking applies to it - Agile Principles: Dive into the principles and flavours of Agile methodologies, including the Data Ops Manifesto. - Innovative SunBeam: Explore the ground breaking concept of SunBeam, from its history to the product design process and documentation. - Hands-on-Experience with Agile and SunBeam: Participate in a series of hands-on group activities using a fictional company and business process as the backdrop, to fully learn how Agile and SunBeam can be used together to design data products. - Delivery Planning: Using the design of your data product, understand how you can create effective data stories and user questions to facilitate delivery.

dbt is SQL-first data transformation tool which can be used in conjunction with a wide range of cloud data platforms. It's aimed at Analytics Engineers, a new discipline that brings together the process focussed discipline of data engineering and business oriented nature of data analysts. If you'd like to learn more about what dbt is and why you should consider using it, this session is for you! This session will demonstrate the dbt Cloud product, showing you how to create your first project and build out a transformed data model, whilst also showcasing some of the features that make dbt special such as automated documentation, macros, lineage and dependencies and orchestration. We'll wrap up by summarising the benefits of dbt, to put you in a great position to understand whether dbt is a tool you should explore further. As dbt is a SQL-first tool, attendees will benefit from a basic knowledge of SQL, though this is intended as a relatively high-level overview, so is not essential.

Fabric is Microsoft's new unified data platform and with it brings many questions of which platform to choose, where does Databricks excel, What makes Fabric the right choice? But it doesn't have to be a binary choice.