Likelihood to Recommend If you can load your data first into your warehouse, dbt is excellent. It does the T(ransformation) part of ELT brilliantly but does not do the E(xtract) or L(oad) part. If you know SQL or your development team knows SQL, it's a framework and extension around that. So, it's easy to learn and easy to hire people with that technical skill (as opposed to specific Informatica,
SnapLogic , etc. experience). dbt uses plain text files and integrates with GitHub. You can easily see the changes made between versions. In GUI-based UIs it was always hard to tell what someone had changed. Each "model" is essentially a "SELECT" statement. You never need to do a "CREATE TABLE" or "CREATE VIEW" - it's all done for you, leaving you to work on the business logic. Instead of saying "FROM specific_db.schema.table" you indicate "FROM ref('my_other_model')". It creates an internal dependency diagram you can view in a DAG. When you deploy, the dependencies work like magic in your various environments. They also have great documentation, an active slack community, training, and support. I like the enhancements they have been making and I believe they are headed in a good direction.
Read full review IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
Data Architect is well suited at organizations of all sizes. It is never too early or unnecessary to enforce proper modelling and design standards on data solutions, and this tool will help that greatly by providing an industry leading data modelling tool, ability to import ETL mappings for data lineage, enforcing and managing naming conventions through the naming convention tool, and publishing of data dictionaries through the report publisher. I was successfully able to build models, provide traceability, and document source to target with lineage throughout for both the business (by providing business definitions in the descriptions), and technical teams (by documenting ETL instructions in text fields) along with field level mapping (by creating "Attachments" representing data sources, tables, and fields) providing easy search capabilities using business friendly terms
Read full review Pros user experience makes it easy to work with SQL and version control customer success team and the dbt (data build tool) community help establish best practices thorough and clear documentation Read full review IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
ER/Studio has the ability to provide consistent field names and data types through domains, which are templates. This provides a way to have consistent naming of common fields, like CreatedBy and the data types for the fields. They also have the ability to change all the fields that use that domain to a different data type. ER/Studio provides the ability to create custom macros. These macros can be used to apply everything from standard fields based on domains to naming all constraints and indexes. I've also used a macro that comes with ER/Studio to spell check field and table names. My favorite feature is the ability to compare your data model to databases for deployments of changes, and to other data models. Read full review Cons Slow load times of the dbt cloud environment (they're working on it via a new UI though) More out-of-the-box solutions for managing procedures, functions, etc would be nice to have, but honestly, it's pretty easy to figure out how to adapt dbt macros Read full review IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
ER\Studio licensing can be cumbersome and upgrading from one version to another usually takes several phone calls and emails to the licensing group to get the update installed and running. The repository can be slow when the model count gets larger. By large I mean 20 to 30 models. A nice feature that I would like to see is table comments be displayed on the model along with the attributes. Currently you have to choose between the two. Read full review Support Rating IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
I can call or email support and both get quick turn around. The only issue is they are on the west coast (US) and have a west coast work schedule and I'm on the East coast.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Most ETL pipeline products have a T layer, but dbt just does it better. The transformation is on steroids compared to the others. Also, just allows much more Adhoc solutions for very specific projects. Those ETL tools are probably better on the T part if you don't need too many transforms - also dbt is pretty much free dependent on how you work it, also extremely scalable.
Read full review IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
ER/Studio is the most mature, reach in features and quality and therefore useful. Unfortunately, it lacks compatibility with AWS Redshift.
Read full review Return on Investment Simplified our BI layer for faster load times Increased the quality of data reaching our end users Makes complex transformations manageable Read full review IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
ER/Studio has had a positive impact on my project as we can develop the data model and have a clear understanding of business needs before we continue with the development phase. Read full review ScreenShots ER/Studio Data Architect Screenshots