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dbt

dbt helps data teams work like software engineers—to ship trusted data, faster.
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What is dbt?

dbt is a transformation workflow that lets teams deploy analytics code following software engineering best practices like modularity, portability, CI/CD, and documentation. Now anyone who knows SQL can build production-grade data pipelines.
dbt is a tool in the Database Tools category of a tech stack.

Who uses dbt?

Companies
130 companies reportedly use dbt in their tech stacks, including Shopify, Primer, and technology.

Developers
350 developers on StackShare have stated that they use dbt.

dbt Integrations

PostgreSQL, Apache Spark, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Snowflake are some of the popular tools that integrate with dbt. Here's a list of all 30 tools that integrate with dbt.
Pros of dbt
5
Easy for SQL programmers to learn
2
CI/CD
2
Schedule Jobs
2
Reusable Macro
2
Faster Integrated Testing
2
Modularity, portability, CI/CD, and documentation
Decisions about dbt

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose dbt in their tech stack.

Cyril Duchon-Doris

Hello, For security and strategic reasons, we are migrating our apps from AWS/Google to a cloud provider with more security certifications and fewer functionalities, named Outscale. So far we have been using Google BigQuery as our data warehouse with ELT workflows (using Stitch and dbt ) and we need to migrate our data ecosystem to this new cloud provider.

We are setting up a Kubernetes cluster in our new cloud provider for our apps. Regarding the data warehouse, it's not clear if there are advantages/inconvenients about setting it up on kubernetes (apart from having to create node groups and tolerations with more ram/cpu). Also, we are not sure what's the best Open source or on-premise tool to use. The main requirement is that data must remain in the secure cluster, and no external entity (especially US) can have access to it. We have a dev cluster/environment and a production cluster/environment on this cloud.

Regarding the actual DWH usage - Today we have ~1.5TB in BigQuery in production. We're going to run our initial rests with ~50-100GB of data for our test cluster - Most of our data comes from other databases, so in most cases, we already have replicated sources somewhere, and there are only a handful of collections whose source is directly in the DWH (such as snapshots, some external data we've fetched at some point, google analytics, etc) and needs appropriate level of replication - We are a team of 30-ish people, we do not have critical needs regarding analytics speed, and we do not need real time. We rebuild our DBT models 2-3 times a day and this usually proves enough

Apart from postgreSQL, I haven't really found open-source or on-premise alternatives for setting up a data warehouse, and running transformations with DBT. There is also the question of data ingestion, I've selected Airbyte and @meltano and I have troubles understanding if one of the 2 is better but Airbytes seems to have a bigger community.

What do you suggest regarding the data warehouse, and the ELT workflows ? - Kubernetes or not kubernetes ? - Postgresql or something else ? if postgre, what are the important configs you'd have in mind ? - Airbyte/DBT or something else.

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Shared insights

I used dbt over manually setting up python wrappers around SQL scripts because it makes managing transformations within Google BigQuery much easier. This saves future Sung dozens of hours maintaining plumbing code to run a couple SQL queries. Check out my tutorial in the link!

I haven't seen any other tool make it as easy to run dependent SQL DAGs directly in a data warehouse.

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dbt's Features

  • Code compiler
  • Package management
  • Seed file loader
  • Data snapshots
  • Understand raw data sources
  • Tests
  • Documentation
  • CI/CD

dbt Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to dbt?
act
Rather than having to commit/push every time you want test out the changes you are making to your .github/workflows/ files (or for any changes to embedded GitHub actions), you can use this tool to run the actions locally. The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides.
Airflow
Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed.
Looker
We've built a unique data modeling language, connections to today's fastest analytical databases, and a service that you can deploy on any infrastructure, and explore on any device. Plus, we'll help you every step of the way.
Apache Spark
Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.
MySQL
The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.
See all alternatives

dbt's Followers
449 developers follow dbt to keep up with related blogs and decisions.