Why transforming data with dbt™ feels as easy as choosing a travel destination

Imagine you’re planning to visit Thailand (given covid-19, imagination is all we’ve got…for now!). You want to visit bustling Bangkok, beaches in Phuket, go island hopping to Phi Phi islands and so much more. Sure you can plan the trip, apply for a visa, choose the best sequence to go through all the places, book accommodation, travel and the list goes on.

Or you can ask a travel agent to do all those things while you kick back and enjoy Thailand. dbt is one such travel agent in the world of data! Here dbt stands for data build tool and the tool allows you to kick back and enjoy your codified logic while it handles the in-betweens.

As long as you look after the ‘what’ of the code, dbt looks after the ‘how’.

Similar to the travel agent who identifies the best sequence to go through your chosen travel locations, dbt too looks after the sequence of prerequisite code to run for your identified code.

But what if you need to add another person to the trip for that one friend who plans last minute? All good the travel agent can squeeze them in. dbt works just the same – you can add that new column or even table of data at a later stage of your project.

Before you travel, the agent sends over the itinerary and other travel documents and, in the world of data, dbt builds documentation for you too.

Here are other benefits and features of dbt including a before and after snapshot to illustrate how dbt can be your elegant solution as you  travel through code.

Benefits of dbt

1. Data Quality Standardisation – dbt tests
Tests can be added to ensure data is unique, not null, has certain values etc.

 

 

 

2. Visibility Across Tables – dbt docs
dbt enables project documentation with graphs that are automatically updated as the project evolves.

 

 

3. Ability to Work in a Sandbox – Managing environments, profiles.yml
As you build code with others as you publish it. dbt makes it easy to switch between environments.

 

 

 

4. dbt Core constantly evolves through open source code

Founded on collaboration, dbt 

• hosts slack channels
• holds office hours

to make dbt better and support the analytics community.

 

 

 

5. Version control with Git – Best Practices

dbt allows transformation to be version controlled by leveraging Git’s capability for collaborative code writing.

 

6. Tight Integration with CI/CD – Example of Efficient CI/CD

Developers can push to production often, test code and automate deployment.

 

Before and after snapshot with dbt

Click the image to enlarge.

dbt Core is a trademark of dbt Labs, Inc.