dbt vs. Oracle Warehouse Builder

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

The best place for Oracle Warehouse Builder is at the business IT level. It's not suited for business-level users. They are easy confused. One way to reduce the confusion for the developers is to set up the workspaces based on the requirements that are discovered in design sessions. Once this is complete, the implementation of Oracle Warehouse Builder can take flight and be successful.

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

• Easy transformation.
• Easy implementation from Oracle to Oracle systems.
• Ease of usage and easy to learn.
• Starting component of metadata management.

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

• What I noticed is that sometimes OWB doesn't generate the best SQL in the package especially when there are a high number of source tables in the ETL. It would be nice if ETL developers were allowed to update the generated packages in the database directly.
• Another thing - moving OWB ETLs from one database to another one could be easier - for example it would be nice to just copy the generated packages from one database to the other one without doing the deployment of these ETLs through OWB.

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

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

Ab>initio, IBM Datastage 8.0

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It improved understanding of ETL functions. Data is consistent. The speed is pretty good.

Incentivized