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

9:40 am

Juan Sequeda : Scar Tissue: Lessons from 20 Years of Building Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs - 3rd Floor - Salon C
Dipankar Mazumdar : What is really 'Open' in an Open Lakehouse Architecture? (ft. Apache Iceberg, Hudi & Delta Lake) - 3rd Floor - Salon A/B
Adriano Vlad-Starrabba : The Enterprise of the Future Runs on Ontologies: Making AI Agents Actually Work - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
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
TBA - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202

10:30 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
TBA - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Tim Berglund : TBD - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

11:20 am

Database Keynote
Hannes Mühleisen : TBD - 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
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

12:00 pm

Main Lunch - Tejas Room (2nd floor)

1:00 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
Andrew Madson : Iceberg for Agents - Elevating Lakehouse Data Into AI-Ready Context - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
TBA - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202
Data Governance Keynote
Winfried Adalbert Etzel : Existence over Essence? Data Governance in times of AI - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Jordan Morrow : The Soul of the Machine: How Your Business Philosophy is the Ultimate AI Differentiator - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

1:50 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

2:40 pm

Data Visualization Keynote
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
TBA - 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

3:20 pm

Meet the O'Reilly authors - check out the latest books from O'Reilly - 3rd Floor - Salon D/E
Open Bar - 3rd Floor Lobby

4:10 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
Shinavier : TBD - 2nd Floor - Classroom 202
TBA - 2nd Floor - Classroom 203
Russell Spitzer : What Apache Iceberg is Bad At …. For Now - 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204

5:00 pm

Closing Town Hall
Joe Reis / Matt Housley : Data Town Hall (O'Reilly authors) 2nd Floor - Ballroom 204