The Data Day Texas 2026 Schedule

8:00 am

Registration and Morning Coffee (2nd Floor Lobby)

9:00 am

Opening Keynote
Patrick McFadin : The Skills that Matter - when everything changes - 3rd Floor - Salon C

9:55 am

Juan Sequeda : Scar Tissue: Lessons from 20 Years of Building Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs - 3rd Floor - Salon C
Matthew Sharp : How to Hack An Agent in 10 Prompts: and other true stories from 2025 - 3rd Floor - Salon A/B
TBA - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
TBA - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202
Dylan Anderson : Beyond the Tech Stack: Navigating the Complete Data Ecosystem - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Lena Hall : Context > Prompts: Context Engineering Deep Dive - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

10:45 am

Bill Inmon : Generative AI and Business Value: Why Corporate Deployment Falls Short - 3rd Floor - Salon C
Jonathan Mugan : LLMs Expand Computer Programs by Adding Judgment - 3rd Floor - Salon A/B
Glauber Costa : Rewriting SQLite in Rust. Here's What We've Learned. - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
TBA - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202
Ryan Boyd : AI for Business Analytics: the Time is Now - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Tim Berglund : Streams of Future Past - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

11:35 am

Database Keynote
Hannes Mühleisen : The Joy of SQL - If Properly Implemented - 3rd Floor - Salon C
Adriano Vlad-Starrabba : The Enterprise of the Future Runs on Ontologies: Making AI Agents Actually Work - 3rd Floor - Salon A/B
Data Visualization Keynote
Christian Miles : "Who Needs a Chart When You Can Just Chat?" - the role of data visualization in a post-LLM world - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
Sanjeev Mohan : 2026 Trends: Building Foundations That Endure - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202
Jonathan Ellis : Brokk: Context Engineering for Large Codebases - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Alex Merced : Designing an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse: From Requirements to a Stakeholder-Ready Architecture - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

12:15 pm

Main Lunch - Tejas Room (2nd floor)

1:15 pm

Shachar Meir : The $1M Data Professional - 3rd Floor - Salon C
Jon Haddad : Stop Guessing, Start Measuring: A Decade of Database Experimentation and Tuning - 3rd Floor - Salon A/B
Weimo Liu : Context Trace/Graph: Observability for AI Agents - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
Arvind Prabhakar : I Built Pipelines. I Don't Trust Them Anymore. - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202
Data Governance Keynote
Winfried Adalbert Etzel : Existence over Essence? Data Governance in times of AI - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Jans Aasman : The Future Cognitive OS Uses a Knowledge-Based Semantic Layer - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

2:05 pm

Jenna Jordan / Amalia Child : Think Like a Librarian: Fresh Perspectives for Data Teams from a Time-Honored Tradition - 3rd Floor - Salon C
Chris Brousseau : Local AI Saves People (Not Clickbait) - 3rd Floor - Salon A/B
Kierra Dotson : The Engineer's Guide to AI Strategy: Bridging the Gap Between Business and Technical Reality - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
Shane Gibson : How to gather data requirements in 30 minutes or less - the Information Product Canvas - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202
Ciro Greco : AI wants to do your data engineering work for you. Should you let it? - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Matthew Mullins : DataOps Is Culture, Not a Toolchain - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

2:55 pm

Aaron Black : How Ideas Become Books: Inside O'Reilly and Data Thought Leadership - 3rd Floor - Salon C
Jean-Georges Perrin : Hands-on Data Product: let's build a data product in 30 minutes (hands-on workshop) - 3rd Floor - Salon A/B
Thais Cooke : The Human Layer of Data: Why Trust Lives in the Work Behind the Numbers - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
Trey Blalock : The Weaponization of AI, Its Impact on Organizations, and How to Respond. - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202
Arthur Bigeard : Building G.V(): Why Graph Databases Desperately Need Better Tools - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Mark Freeman II : Code: The Untapped Metadata Source Driving Most Data Failures - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

3:35 pm

Meet the O'Reilly authors - check out the latest books from O'Reilly - 3rd Floor - Ballroom pre-function area/em>
Open Bar - 3rd Floor Lobby

4:25 pm

Clair Sullivan : Your Skills, Your Business: Layoff-Proof Your Career through Solopreneurship - 3rd Floor - Salon C
Paul Blankley : Agents are eating the semantic layer - 3rd Floor - Salon A/B
Alexandra Pasi : Learning Beyond Language: A New Geometric Paradigm for Better ML - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
Vaibhav Gupta : Building a new programming language in 2026 - A BAML AMA Session - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202
Sarah McKenna / Casey O'Neill : Agentic AI Without the Lawsuits: What Actually Works for Web Automation - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Russell Spitzer : What Apache Iceberg is Bad At …. For Now - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

5:15 pm

Closing Town Hall
Joe Reis / Matt Housley : Data Town Hall 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204
Sponsored by Brian Bickell and the fine folks at TextQL

6:30 pm - 10:00 pm

Post Conference Meet and Greet
We have reserved Gabriel's in the lower level of the hotel for post conference drinks and food.
Feel free to drop in immediate after the conference - or drop by after dinner.