
My Top 10 Talks at Data Council 2025
The no-bullshit data conference returns. Top talks on RAG, AI agents, LLM systems, data engineering, and the future.
12 min read

Data Council has been my favorite data conference since 2013. Pete Soderling created something special: a conference that provides learning, community, and fun—the three pillars that make events actually valuable.
Top 10 talks I'm excited about
1. Building Blocks: Reusing Queries in Semantic Data Modeling
Lloyd Tabb (Looker founder, Malloy creator) on advanced semantic data modeling. How reusing queries creates more powerful building blocks for humans and AI.
2. What Goes Around Comes Around... and Around
Andy Pavlo (CMU) presents 60 years of data modeling history, showing why RM/SQL remains the default choice. Vector databases, NoSQL, OO databases—all claimed SQL was dying. None succeeded in replacing it.
3. Data Engineering Is Not Software Engineering, Until It Is
CL Kao (Recce CEO) on how data engineering is evolving beyond traditional software practices. dbt, SQLMesh, GitOps, CI/CD for data pipelines.
4. Failure Is A Funnel
Bryan Bischof (Theory Ventures) on LLM quality engineering. From slop to production: systematic approaches to evaluating and improving LLM performance.
5. The Future Of Guardrails
Shreya Rajpal (Guardrails AI) on next-gen safety measures for production AI systems, RAG chatbots, and autonomous agents.
6. RAGs to Riches: Engineering the Future of LLM Systems
Keynote panel: Denis Yarats (Perplexity), Joseph Gonzalez(Berkeley/RunLLM). Bridging academic theory and practical application.
7. Data Meets Intelligence: Where Data Infra and AI Stack Converge
George Mathew (Insight Partners), Naveen Rao(Databricks). How data infrastructure and AI capabilities are becoming interdependent.
8. Write Less More: How Dagster Rebuilt Our Docs from the Ground Up
Pedram Navid (Dagster) on completely overhauling documentation. Transforming docs from frustration into powerful communication tool.
9. AI is Going to Break Your Data Platform - Are You Ready?
Doron Porat (Lakeway CEO) on AI's unpredictable force disrupting data operations. Building AI-ready platforms that thrive on change.
10. RAG In 2025: State Of The Art And The Road Forward
Tengyu Ma (Voyage AI, Stanford) on enterprise RAG systems. Advanced techniques for production-ready systems at scale.
View full Data Council schedule • Enter the AI Springtime giveaway for a chance to win a free ticket (20% discount for all entrants).