dbt vs. Devart Excel Add-ins

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

For a mid size company it is a perfect tool like IT application companies but if companies having large Data like Banks it is less appropriate

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

• Source control
• Unit testing
• Schema comparisons

Incentivized

• 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

• It has room for improvement in terms of security and making it possible for large organizations like us to use it in a more secure way with integrating with our in-house security systems.
• Pricing could be reduced further for it to be adopted world-wide.
• it isn't foolproof. Excel has no means of checking for human error during data entry, which means that the wrong information can skew all the results - sometimes severe.
• Users unfamiliar with Excel syntax may also find entering calculations and calling up other functions a bit frustrating until they get a solid understanding.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It automated the whole reporting and excel. Our team can generate pivot, dashboards and multiple other reports in various formats and update them with one click. My Sales team need to update more then 1500 leads status on daily basis. By using this tool now they can do this in few minutes.

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

Microsoft Excel is the most used tool in the software universe. As such, asking Microsoft Excel to be the tool used post data acquisition makes a ton of sense. Almost everyone we hire has some idea on how to use this tool, which decreases the time spend training new employees.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It had a positive ROI as we used it on its strengths. We could save time and make some of our processes simpler.
• It does help us up to a certain limit - but it acts as a part of our general IT infrastructure. It cannot solve our direct business objectives.
• It cannot be expanded in all directions as we need a lot more native coding and IT infrastructure.

Incentivized