dbt vs. Paxata

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

Paxata can be highly useful to someone who doesn't like/have any experience with writing codes to treat data before using it as input into BI dashboards. Paxata can accelerate data cleaning in environments where a large amount of unclean data is generated and business decisions on the go are required. It performs really well while dealing with natural language.

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

• Visualize distributions in large data sets effectively which enable the user to quickly spot outliers and treat them appropriately
• Provides recommendation to merge datasets based on matching column values
• The cluster and edit feature in my opinion is its most powerful feature and reduces cardinality in column with text

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

• Doesn't provide recommendation on how to impute values
• There is a lag quite often
• We can say whether a column has errors or quality issues in the first look

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

Paxata is a much better tool when it comes to handling natural language but Talend provides recommendations on how to impute missing values and outliers. Paxata provides recommendations on dataset tie-ups and joins but Talend doesn't provide any such recommendations. In paxata you can visualize distribution of data in a column and filter them by dragging and selecting the section you'd like to retain

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It saves time to clean data
• It reduces the requirement of too many data engineer/stewards and hence adds positive impact on the return of the business

Incentivized