Alteryx Designer Cloud vs. dbt

For doing ETL and data transformations where your data is already in a cloud environment Alteryx Designer Cloud is ideal. It allows for the continued democratisation of data and analytics to permeate more extensively throughout a business, particularly those that are already in the cloud or have cloud services in place and are comfortable with procurement and consumption of these systems over and above desktop software. The ETL processing for data validation and wrangling uses machine learning to enable highly efficient data manipulation which saves lots of time and this is a distinct advantage over the desktop software. The expansion and integration of other Alteryx cloud services such as ML, Metrics Store and App builder will only strengthen this position

The prerequisite is that you have a supported database/data warehouse and have already found a way to ingest your raw data. Then dbt is very well suited to manage your transformation logic if the people using it are familiar with SQL. If you want to benefit from bringing engineering practices to data, dbt is a great fit. It can bring CI/CD practices, version control, automated testing, documentation generation, etc. It is not so well suited if the people managing the transformation logic do not like to code (in SQL) but prefer graphical user interfaces.

Incentivized

• Combining large data sets - these can be compressed into database files to make for faster runs.
• Formatting data - this can take 45 min of formatting an excel sheet and run it in 7 seconds.
• Sending large batch emails - some workflows we have send out 50+ emails to customers in just minutes.

Incentivized

• dbt supports version control through GIT, this allows teams to collaborate and track the data transformation logic.
• dbt allows us to build data models which helps to break complex transformation logic into simple and smaller logic.
• dbt is completely based on SQL which allows data analyst and data engineers to build the transformation logic.
• dbt can be easily integrated with snowflake.

Incentivized

• New tools to match the ones existing in Designer on-premise.
• Environments management.
• Environment variables handling.

• Field-level lineage (currently at table level)
• Documentation inheritance - if a field is documented the downstream field of the same name could inherit the doc info
• Adding python model support (in beta now)

Incentivized

I feel like the usability works for every level of computer user. There are very simple tools that can accomplish a huge amount of time savings, and there are very complex tools that can give you even more. We mainly use just the simple tools in our company and have gained an incredible amount of time savings

Incentivized

It requires proficiency with SQL coding and with git practices, but with these prerequisites, it is easy to use. Especially with the dbt cloud, you get a nice interface that makes all the administrative tasks like scheduling jobs quite easy. I also like the built-in SQL editor with syntax highlighting and auto-completion.

Incentivized

Our IT group presented Trifacta to me. They picked it out and among the crowd for me. This was way beyond ETL tools, SQL, or any programming language. It's just much faster and because it's sitting on Hadoop you bypass some of the slowdowns typically faced with RDBMS.

Incentivized

I actually don't know what the alternative to dbt is. I'm sure one must exist other than more 'roll your own' options like Apache Airflow, say, bu tin terms of super easy managed/cloud data transforms, dbt really does seem to be THE tool to use. It's $50/month per dev, BUT there's a FREE version for 1 dev seat with no read-only access for anyone else, so you can always start with that and then buy yourself a seat later.

Incentivized

• It makes it easier to hire staff for data cleaning.

Incentivized

• Simplified our BI layer for faster load times
• Increased the quality of data reaching our end users
• Makes complex transformations manageable

Incentivized