In this blog post, we will be sharing the presentations made by our analytics engineers for the dbt labs Berlin Meetup. These presentations are videos that demonstrate our vision of data modelling and incremental loading of data at TIER.

Knowledge sharing within the team plays an important part in our culture and is no exception in this case. The meetup was organised by the Analytics Engineering Herd.

Hint: The Herd of Herds (HoH) is a concept applied at TIER. It is a way to connect departments, find synergies, define standards, and work together to deliver complex solutions at scale. A Herd is a group of people with a shared interest who regularly collaborate to improve their expertise. Herds own and align on the standards and ways of working to improve a subset of services/applications/products.

Unlike other herds in the company that work on tickets and allocate working time, the Analytics Engineering Herd is more of a support system for the analytics engineers.

When the meetup was arranged, Victoria Perez Mola, Team Lead in the Analytics Platform, suggested her teammates participate and prepare the presentations themselves, after which a list of the speakers and topics was created. Later, the list was shared with the meetup attendees, and the members voted for the most engaging topics. In addition, the Herd assisted in preparation for the presentation by rehearsing and providing feedback on their talk content and resources.

The first presentation, Incremental Models by Faisal El-Shami, Senior Analytics Engineer at TIER, outlined when to go for incremental models, when not to, and how to approach these models. Finally, El-Shami showed how we scaled some of our most complex models with our approach.

The next video, Modelling Structures Tips & Tricks: Designing Your Models, was presented by Alex Ryan, Analytics Engineer at TIER. In this video, attendees learned about transformation layers, common table expressions (CTE), and families of models. The list of the banal platitudes came as a bonus!