Mehdi Ouazza
I started my career in data 10+ years ago as a data engineer, working in large corporates like AXA setting up on-prem Spark clusters (yes, that old!) to tech unicorns building data platforms in the cloud at Klarna, Back Market, and Trade Republic.
Over the years, I found a passion for sharing what I learned and teaching others. It became my full-time job when I joined as the first DevRel at MotherDuck (DuckDB in the cloud) in 2023.
I believe learning should be fun. I enjoy making complex topics more approachable through storytelling and creativity.
I want to keep teaching curious students (in-person and online) and help the next generation learn not just data, but software engineering in this post-AI world.
Session
Is it still worth learning SQL in 2026, or can we just "chat" with our data? This hands-on tutorial explores that exact question by pushing Text-to-SQL to its absolute limits. This won't be just happy paths; we will deliberately expose where LLMs fail : ambiguity, hallucinations, and "dirty" data...and build the engineering stack required to fix them!
You will build a local data Agent from scratch using DuckDB, MCP and a minimalist semantic layer. By the end, you will understand the hard boundaries of AI reasoning, how a semantic layer acts as a safety net, and why knowing SQL is still (since 1974) the most critical skill for building reliable analytics agents.