Is the Data Council Conference Worth Attending?
We knew that the Data Council is a very well-established conference for data people. But reading about it is always different from attending, right? This year, we decided to find out if the conference was the right platform for our company. To get things started, we decided to sponsor the conference.
So, what is this article about?
I would like to share with you my experiences from the whole trip (not only) to the United States, how we experienced the conference itself, and what other surprises we had.
Let’s start!
Tyler Durdan
Though the GoodData headquarters is in San Francisco, the majority of employees, including me are based in Prague and Brno in the Czech Republic. So every conference in the United States means to travel across the Atlantic. Usually, that means more than 10 hours of uninterrupted flight time. Is there anyone who likes it? I don’t think so. Often, it reminds me of the Tyler Durdan character from the movie Fight Club. I hope to (never) end up like him.
Day 1 — The Day of My Presentation
I have been doing developer advocacy for nearly 2 years, but I always get so nervous before presentations! Well, it’s getting better, but it’s still far from zero stress.
This time I didn’t have enough time to absorb the jet lag, and the day before, I visited a customer in another state, so I wasn’t really fresh.
However, being stressed has its perks — I always prepare a slide deck long before the presentation, rewrite it several times, and repeat it in my head again and again. Sometimes my wife gets mad at me for presenting even in my sleep.
So, when my presentation started at 10:40 AM. It went smoothly, as always. I was able to improvise and present a live demo without any hiccups. People were engaged and asked several questions — that’s why I am doing that!
And what was my presentation about?
Recently we rolled out a new heart of our analytics platform. The overall concept is called Analytics Lake. It consists of a semantic layer uniquely combined with a physical execution layer called FlexQuery. It is powered by state-of-the-art open-source technologies such as Apache Arrow and DuckDB.
Want to learn more about FlexQuery?
- I recommend you to read an umbrella article I wrote just before the conference
- Check out the Data Council page containing a link to my slide deck. Soon it will contain a link to the recording too.
- And last, but not least, we have a white paper about the Analytics Lake concept from Donald Farmer.
What else happened during the first day?
Together with Ryan Dolley we recorded a LinkedIn live stream recapping what’s happening at the conference.
And what better thing to do at the end of the day than go to a party? Ryan and I were invited to a special party for speakers. Ryan knows basically everybody in the industry so he introduced me to many interesting people there including Zhamak Dehghani, the keynote speaker and CEO of a very interesting company Nextdata. And of course, we also drank some great mixed drinks.
Day 2 — Talking with Communities
I came; I presented; I conquered. What else?
Being overdosed by lack of stress, I wanted to meet literally everybody.
And now the effort of being an active member of many communities paid back.
I had made arrangements with some people in Slack communities in advance. Some approached me through LinkedIn. Some ping me during the conference. Most interesting discussions I had with:
Tobiko data
Tobiko Data are the owners of SQLMesh(alternative to dbt) and SQLGlot(SQL manipulation).
My blueprint data pipeline now utilizes dbt for transformations, but I am not fully satisfied. Let’s try SQLMesh as an alternative!
We heavily rely on the Apache Calcite framework for SQL generation (from our semantic layer and homemade MAQL metric language). Could SQLglot be a valid replacement? Could we support SQL metrics as an alternative to MAQL metrics? Could we contribute our SQL optimizations to SQLglot?
I met four people from Tobiko Data, including their Chief Architect, Iaroslav Zeigerman. They were not only very smart but also really friendly. Thanks for your time!
And you, readers, should watch them carefully!
MotherDuck
No need to introduce MotherDuck, right? Powered by the currently most popular OLAP DB DuckDB, they aim to be generally available in June with a cloud database service.
I met Tino, CPO of MotherDuck. We continued discussing a potential partnership and ideal use cases we can do together:
Embedded data applications running on top of MotherDuck
GoodData is the top player in this area with its first-class support for embedding and UI(Javascript, Typescript) SDK.
Multi-tenancy
MotherDuck plans to provide first-class support for multi-tenancy as a part of GA. It will be possible to define various user groups and assign (dedicate) resources to them.
GoodData, again, is the top player in this field, with a concept of workspace hierarchies and storage tiers in FlexQuery. To combine capabilities from both to deliver a real end-to-end multi-tenancy, well.. that would be something!
Arch.dev
I am a big fan of Meltano, the tool for extracting and loading data. I also described why I chose Meltano.
Meanwhile, Taylor Murphy, one of the leaders of the Meltano project, started a new company, Arch.dev. They aim to provide declarative and multi-tenant ELT pipelines running on top of the Hydra DB engine (100% compatible with PostgreSQL, columnar, optimized for OLAP queries).
What a match for GoodData!
We agreed to build a demo integrating both worlds and propagate it.
MinIO
MinIO is an alternative to cloud object storage, such as AWS S3, that is fully compatible with AWS S3 and provides more advanced features.
Brenna (Craft) Buuck from MinIO visited our booth, most likely thanks to my presentation about FlexQuery. I specifically mentioned that my live demo of FlexQuery is fully running locally on my laptop and is integrated with Minio. She expressed her motivation to test it on her side, ideally using a corresponding docker-compose.yaml. Unfortunately, we deprecated our community edition even though I was fighting hard against it. Hopefully, soon I will be able to give a relevant experience to Brenna so she can play with that and write an article about that.
Stackless Data
Stackless Data is our customer. So, why am I talking about them here?
Well, because they developed something amazing and inspirational. They built a marketplace for analytics objects. Users can pick(and uninstall) insights/dashboards they really value. The way how the content is marketed to end users is really interesting.
But how were they able to develop something like that? Actually, with our Python SDK. They automatically and seamlessly provision analytics objects with it. We extended our SDK to support them even better. This is a really valuable partnership!
Day 3 — Calm Down
Eventually, the stress of the last few days caught up with me, and I fell asleep. 😀
No big deal, the last day most people had already left the conference. I had a few conversations, packed our booth, and left the building of the conference at Texas University.
Then we took a trip to town. We visited the local Capitol and it was interesting to see the interior, pictures of all the governors (well, the first two were presidents, did you know?), etc.
Finally, we found a well-known donut shop. I love sweets, but when I ate two donuts, I was almost unable to return to the hotel. We European sweet lovers still have a lot to learn from the American ones. Or should we rather not?
Crazy Idea — Costa Rica?
We, with my colleagues attending the conference, were thinking about extending our stay in the United States. We were considering visiting Dallas or New Orleans.
But during the conference, my colleague Lukáš Uher had a crazy idea — how about organizing a trip to Costa Rica? He is thinking about investing in an apartment there and wants to see it with his own eyes.
“Would you join me?” he asked. The only possible answer from us was, of course, “yes”!
And then everything happened all at once. Lukas bought flight tickets and arranged car loans (Austin -> Houston, San Jose -> Puerto Jimenez). We woke up on Friday at 2 AM, traveled by car to Houston, and took a 3-hour flight to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. There, we took a car and headed down the coast to Puerto Jimenez (southwest).
Would I recommend visiting this part of the country? Definitely, especially at this time of year! The weather was perfect, and the ocean was beautiful. But nature, a few steps from the ocean, was even more exciting — both fauna and flora. Also, this part of the country has not yet been discovered by tourists.
Nothing like getting on a beach and enjoying the peace!
Houston — One Giant Leap for Mankind
Once we returned from Costa Rica to Houston, we still had a day before the flight home. It was my turn to invent something. What else could I suggest other than to visit the Space Center?
I expected much, but the reality exceeded my expectations. You get to the first building and see all the artifacts, great. But then you take a small train and move to a huge building with the Saturn V rocket. Below are a few photos, but they are nothing compared to when you are physically there. I read every info board until I was notified by my colleagues that we didn’t have the whole day, as we had to return to Austin not to miss our flight to Europe. If you are as big of a fan of cosmonautics as I am, reserve enough time for this!
In the end, you can also look inside the aforementioned Space Shuttles! Terrific!
So Is the Data Council Conference Worth Attending?
After the 3rd day at the conference, we voted if we wanted to attend the next year.
The conclusion?
- As the a, I voted “Yes, definitely.” Because the audience is more than relevant and inspirational.
- My colleagues (lead-wise) voted mostly “no.” GoodData is quite a big company with even much bigger customers. Relevant prospects usually do not visit such a conference for “nerds,” not even their developers (like what we observe at dbt Coalesce).
- However, we found a new opportunity — potential partners. For example, we had a very interesting conversation with Astrodata.
Generally speaking, if you are a small startup or a venture capitalist, this is your conference. If you are a company like GoodData, it depends. But personally, I can’t do anything but recommend you to attend! 🙂
