With the world moving to online conferences since 2020, we figured it was a good time to experiment with a new medium of conference engagement.

We are partners with dbt and we're sponsoring Coalesce 2021. 

The inaugural Coalesce conference took the analytics world by storm. One of the highlights of 2020 was watching the sessions with the vibrant chat taking place alongside in Slack. We wanted to build on this with a fun game for the Slack workspace.

We figured the game had to have something to do with SQL, it had to be simple enough to allow people of all skill levels to have a go, but open ended enough that the true SQL nerds could run wild.

It also needed to be asynchronous, because Coalesce takes place across timezones, and finally, it needed to be a collaborative creation that the dbt community could keep as a memento of 2021.

Introducing SQL Draw

SQL Draw is a native app that runs in the dbt community Slack. Players write SQL queries to the Draw Bot that plots pixels on a cartesian plane. 

We'll be playing throughout Coalesce with awards for the best artworks during our session at the end of the week.

It starts very simple, for example, we can draw some grass and sky like this:

Easy right?

But, get a little fancier with your code and you can build any number of patterns and textures. Credit to @boxysean for this little creation.

But there's another twist...

Since it's a dbt conference, SQL Draw also supports Jinja! 
That means players can build using macros that others have contributed to the SQL Draw git repository. It's an analogy of dbt in a real analytics organisation.

It means I can draw a circle using a macro https://gallery.sqldraw.omnata.com/#!/macro/macro.dbt_sql_draw.is_in_circle

And if you take this further, well... the possibilities are truly out of this world.

Join in the fun!

The best part about this game is seeing the creativity of the community.

We'd love to see what you can contribute.

Go to SQL Draw ➡️ 

Or join us on the dbt Slack 
Play in: #coalesce-sqldraw 
Discuss in: #coalesce-sqldraw-discussion