Data Days CLE 2026 (Conference Day): Full Schedule

10:00am EDT

The Data Warehouse You Can Build on Your Laptop

Thursday October 15, 2026 10:00am - 10:50am EDT

Your organization runs on data — it's how you know what's working and how you make the case to sustain and grow your programs. But most teams hit a wall after a spreadsheet or two: sources multiply, staying current becomes a chore, and trusting the numbers gets harder just as complexity increases.
The good news: you don't need a big budget or an IT department to fix this. Using free and open-source tools — DuckDB, dbt, and the spreadsheets you already trust — you can build a real data warehouse that runs on your own laptop.
Drawing on 13 years experience in the non profit sector, and first hand experience building data warehouses, this talk walks through what's achievable in 2026: centralizing scattered data, encoding your team's institutional knowledge into clean and tested data, and freeing up time to actually ask the questions you've never had time for. Live demos will show these ideas in action — mapping civic open data with DuckDB, Leaflet, and H3, running real SQL queries, and automating it all with GitHub Actions.
If you've ever wished your data could do more than sit in a spreadsheet, this session will show you exactly how to get started — no procurement request required.

Speakers

David Pickering

Personal

David is an analyst turned analytics engineer who spent over a decade in the non-profit sector, building analytics teams from the ground up. He specializes in modern data tooling — Snowflake, Python, DuckDB — with a mild dbt obsession and a particular love of geospatial analytics... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 10:00am - 10:50am EDT
Conference Room C (2nd Floor)

Experienced Data Users

Audience Experienced

Data Days CLE 2026 (Conference Day)

10:00am EDT

David Pickering

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