Amazon Athena vs. dbt

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Athena
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Athena at their data stored in S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to setup or manage, and customers pay only for the queries they run. You can use Athena to process logs, perform ad-hoc analysis, and run…
$5
per TB of Data Scanned
dbt
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
dbt is an SQL development environment, developed by Fishtown Analytics, now known as dbt Labs. The vendor states that with dbt, analysts take ownership of the entire analytics engineering workflow, from writing data transformation code to deployment and documentation. dbt Core is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, and paid Teams and Enterprise editions are available.
$0
per month per seat
Pricing
Amazon Athenadbt
Editions & Modules
Price per Query
$5.00
per TB of Data Scanned
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Athenadbt
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Athenadbt
Features
Amazon Athenadbt
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
8.6
4 Ratings
1% above category average
dbt
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching8.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups7.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions9.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics8.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment9.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Transformations
Comparison of Data Transformations features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
-
Ratings
dbt
9.7
8 Ratings
19% above category average
Simple transformations00 Ratings10.08 Ratings
Complex transformations00 Ratings9.48 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
-
Ratings
dbt
9.1
8 Ratings
15% above category average
Data model creation00 Ratings9.78 Ratings
Metadata management00 Ratings8.78 Ratings
Business rules and workflow00 Ratings9.08 Ratings
Collaboration00 Ratings10.06 Ratings
Testing and debugging00 Ratings8.08 Ratings
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Amazon Athenadbt
Small Businesses
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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IBM InfoSphere Information Server
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Score 8.0 out of 10
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Score 8.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon Athenadbt
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(4 ratings)
10.0
(10 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Athenadbt
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
If you are looking to take a lot of the traditional "database administration" work off someone's plate, going with Amazon Athena certainly has "no code" options to optimize lots of database tasks. I would say this option is less appropriate if you have other Microsoft things at play, such as Power BI.
Read full review
dbt Labs
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.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Nested Schemas like JSON data structure
  • Ability to adapt the data model to fit your queries better
  • Performance Improvement
Read full review
dbt Labs
  • 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.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Response caching can be improved.
  • Data Partitioning is tricky and understanding of the same could be improved.
Read full review
dbt Labs
  • 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)
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
Easy to use. Scalable. Gets the job of data warehousing setup done. Using the datalake on S3 has become super convenient.
Read full review
dbt Labs
dbt is very easy to use. Basically if you can write SQL, you will be able to use dbt to get what you need done. Of course more advanced users with more technical skills can do more things.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Read full review
dbt Labs
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • The query speeds help us make more decisions in a day (speed).
  • If you need more horsepower for specific times in the day this option helps scale.
  • The security of your environment is well protected too.
Read full review
dbt Labs
  • Simplified our BI layer for faster load times
  • Increased the quality of data reaching our end users
  • Makes complex transformations manageable
Read full review
ScreenShots