Auckland Data Eng meetup, April 2025

Speakers:
🎤 Jenny Sahng, Project Lead & Senior Data Generalist, Rewiring Aotearoa
Talk Title: The machine count: a database of every single fossil fuel machine in Aotearoa New Zealand
Talk Summary: Despite our highly renewable electricity grid, 67% of New Zealand’s energy consumption remains fossil fuel-based, powering millions of everyday machines like cars and gas stoves. To meet climate targets, we must transition away from these machines. But until now, there has been no publicly available dataset on what these machines are, making it difficult to create a practical emissions reduction plan. Rewiring Aotearoa, a climate data non-profit, has conducted the country’s first comprehensive inventory of fossil fuel machines, to complement ambitious climate targets with practical implementation. This talk explores how the Rewiring team approached this data challenge – by considering traditional pipeline solutions like Mage, Dagster, cloud infrastructure on AWS, and Python pipelines as well as no-code solutions like spreadsheets. In the end, a well-designed spreadsheet solution delivered better value than a complex automated pipeline for our specific use case. We’ll discuss the trade-offs considered and the data engineering principles that were still a key part of the database design. You’ll also learn about some of the cool zero-emissions electric machines that are available in NZ today (jet boats, tractors, helicopters, EVs, and more!) that can save you money while decarbonising your home!

Speaker Bio: Jenny is a project lead and data generalist at Rewiring Aotearoa, combining data expertise with climate communication to drive emissions reduction in NZ. Previously a data scientist at Xero and founding team at kiwi tech startup Multitudes, she co-founded Climate Club Aotearoa, making climate action accessible for everyday New Zealanders.

🎤 Francesco Puppini, Business Intelligence R&D, Francesco Puppini Consulting
Talk Title: Self Service Analytics for business users and AI
Talk Summary: This talk will talk about the Unified Star Schema (USS), a special data model that turns complex data models into a single star schema, very easy to use. The presentation will also show how the USS is built.
Speaker Bio: Francesco Puppini is an Italian freelance consultant in business intelligence and data warehousing. He is the inventor of the Unified Star Schema, which is also the title of a book that he wrote with Bill Inmon. He was always focusing on the “last mile challenge”: how to deliver information to business users. He is currently focusing on algorithms of graph theory applied to data modeling. He is also working on a framework of communication between LLMs and semantic layers. His ultimate goal is to put the foundations of a full experience of self-service access to information.

If you’d like to present at future meetups, please submit your talk here!

Remember to bring along some great questions! See you all there…