Announcing Doug Needham’s Hands-On WWDVC 2026 Workshop: Building Better Data Vaults — Organizing Data Structures for Speed, Savings, and Success
DataVaultAlliance is thrilled to announce that Doug Needham will once again be joining us at the World-Wide Data Vault Consortium (WWDVC) 2026, this time bringing a brand-new, deeply practical workshop designed for anyone building modern data platforms. His session, “Building Better Data Vaults: Organizing Data Structures for Speed, Savings, and Success,” takes aim at one of the most important, and most overlooked – parts of Data Vault architecture: the design decisions that quietly determine whether a system becomes fast, efficient, and scalable… or slow, costly, and brittle.
This hands-on workshop invites participants to roll up their sleeves and immerse themselves in the realities of making smart structural choices. Doug emphasizes that every design decision has consequences, particularly in cloud environments where both performance and cost are at stake. Throughout the workshop, he’ll guide attendees through practical exercises that reveal how to evaluate source systems, understand the value of incoming data, and organize attributes in a way that simplifies and strengthens the overall vault design.
Rather than relying on theoretical examples, Doug leads participants through processes they can immediately apply when they return to their own projects. You’ll explore how to profile real source data thoughtfully, how to distinguish meaningful attributes from noise, and how eliminating unnecessary non-key fields can have a surprisingly significant impact. The workshop also highlights methods for narrowing the search for reliable business keys, a task that often slows projects down, while helping teams make decisions grounded in measurable value instead of guesswork.
A major theme running throughout the session is designing with the cloud in mind. As Doug demonstrates, well-organized data structures don’t just help developers work faster; they reduce cloud compute cycles, cut storage waste, and improve the performance of downstream processes. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how practical, everyday modeling decisions connect directly to real financial outcomes.
Doug’s teaching style blends clarity, pragmatism, and years of architectural experience. He’s known for taking abstract modeling principles and reframing them as actionable, repeatable practices, something teams can adopt without friction. Participants will leave not only with new insights but also with templates, techniques, and a renewed sense of how Data Vault design can drive both technical and business success.
Whether you’re a data engineer refining your craft, an architect responsible for long-term platform health, or part of a team looking to modernize your modeling approach, this workshop offers a rare opportunity to learn directly from one of the field’s most practical thinkers.
Join us at WWDVC 2026 and experience Doug’s newest hands-on session. Space is limited to preserve an interactive environment, so be sure to reserve your seat early. More details about the full conference agenda will be available soon, but we can already say this: if you’re working with Data Vaults in any capacity, you won’t want to miss this.
We can’t wait to see you at WWDVC 2026. Reserve your seat in the link.
