What Is Recce Showing at Coalesce 2025?

Why Is Recce at Coalesce 2025?

Coalesce is the largest annual gathering of dbt practitioners — analytics engineers, data engineers, and data platform teams who build and maintain the transformation layer of the modern data stack. For Recce, it is the natural venue to show how AI-powered data review fits into the dbt workflow that these teams already use.

At Coalesce 2025 in Las Vegas, the Recce team is on the conference floor demonstrating Recce Cloud and connecting with data teams who are struggling with the gap between passing dbt tests and actually trusting their data.

What Is Recce Cloud and What Does It Do?

Recce Cloud is the hosted version of Recce’s data review platform. It plugs into your existing dbt project and CI/CD pipeline to automate the data validation steps that most teams do manually — or skip entirely.

Here is what Recce Cloud provides on every pull request:

Capability	What It Does	Why It Matters
Automated data diffs	Compares dev data against production	Catches value-level changes that dbt tests miss
Schema diff	Detects column additions, removals, type changes	Prevents breaking changes from reaching production
Column-level lineage	Maps exactly which downstream models are affected	Scopes review to the blast radius of a change
Profile diff	Compares statistical distributions between environments	Surfaces subtle shifts in data shape
AI review summaries	Generates plain-language explanations of data changes	Reduces time to understand what a PR actually does to data

For teams already using dbt, Recce Cloud adds the data validation layer that sits between dbt test and the merge button. Understanding what an AI data review agent does in this context helps clarify why automated data checks are becoming essential.

What Is the Data Renegade Happy Hour?

The Data Renegade Happy Hour is a recurring community event that Recce hosts at major data engineering conferences. It started as a way to bring people together outside the structured conference format — no slides, no pitches, just conversations between practitioners.

The happy hour returns at Coalesce 2025 after a successful first edition. The format is intentionally casual: data engineers, analytics engineers, and anyone else in the data ecosystem gathering to talk about what actually happens in their day-to-day work. The “renegade” framing ties back to the Data Renegades podcast, which features the engineers behind foundational data tools sharing unfiltered stories.

For attendees looking to connect with the Recce team, the happy hour is the most direct opportunity — away from the conference floor noise.

What Data Review Challenges Are Teams Bringing to Coalesce?

Based on conversations at previous conferences and in the Recce community, data teams heading to Coalesce 2025 are grappling with recurring themes:

• CI pipelines that test but don’t validate — dbt tests pass, but nobody checks whether the actual data changed in ways that matter. Teams want to know what dbt CI should check beyond tests.
• No visibility into change impact — a model change that looks small can cascade through dozens of downstream models. Without column-level lineage, teams cannot scope the blast radius of a PR.
• Review bottlenecks — data teams lack the equivalent of code review for data. A software engineer’s PR gets automated tests, linting, and peer review. A data engineer’s PR gets a green checkmark from dbt test and a prayer.
• Slow incident response — when bad data reaches production, teams spend hours figuring out what changed and when. Data diffs and lineage analysis can compress that timeline from hours to minutes.

These challenges are not unique to any one team or industry. They are structural gaps in how the data ecosystem handles change management.

How Does Recce Compare to Other Tools at Coalesce?

Coalesce attracts a range of vendors in the data quality and observability space. Recce’s approach is distinct in that it focuses specifically on the PR-level review workflow rather than post-deployment monitoring:

Approach	When It Acts	What It Catches
dbt tests	Build time	Structural violations (nulls, uniqueness, relationships)
Data observability	Post-deployment	Anomalies in production metrics and freshness
Recce (data review)	PR time	Value-level changes between dev and prod before merging

This pre-merge positioning means Recce catches issues before they reach production — complementing rather than competing with tools that monitor data after deployment.

How to Connect with Recce at Coalesce 2025

The Recce team is available throughout the conference for live demos of Recce Cloud. Whether your team is evaluating data review tools, looking to automate CI validation, or just curious about how AI-assisted review works in practice, the conference floor and the Data Renegade Happy Hour are both good starting points.

For teams that cannot attend in person, the Recce Cloud demo is available online, and the conversations happening at Coalesce will inform upcoming content on the Recce blog and the Data Renegades podcast.