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
Talend Open Studio
Score 6.1 out of 10
N/A
Talend Open Studio is an open source integration software, used to build basic data pipelines or execute simple ETL and data integration tasks, get graphical profiles of data, and manage files from a locally installed, open-source environment.
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.
For quick daily integrations Talend is a very good tool and it makes development time so short and easy. Citizen developers who are not great programmers can pick up and start using Talend Open Studio within weeks. It's well suited for all kinds of data migration between various systems. It is less appropriate for smaller synchronous services where you need to trace the complete transaction and how data moved between them. It's also less appropriate for small data movements where other tools can be easier to use and manage.
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
The community is not that up to date and forum is not that great in response. Probably we should make people aware of the tool more on how to use and its implementations.
Talend crashes when transforming a lot of data (millions of rows).
Proper training documentation is a must for talend which is currently lagging. This will help users to learn more about Talend and use it effectively.
There is no licence requirement for Talend Open Studio. So, this is not relevant question. However, if you are asking whether we will use Talend in future. Yes. We will continue to use it. It's very powerful free tool which caters to all our extra, transform, load capabilities. We just love Talend for it's great functionality and ease of use.
Talend Open Studio is based on Eclipse and is full of redundant procedures to do one thing, like when installing libraries. Sometimes I cannot manually download the libraries that it can't find.
Many times, Talend freezes. When you give a cancel command, it takes several minutes to stop. It also takes a great toll on our PC with 16 GB of ram and I7 CPU, even in idle status. If you are downloading Maven Jar/Libraries, you cannot do anything and have to wait until the task is finished.
Talend Open Studio is free and we are not using the enterprise version which comes with licence and support. So, mostly depend on the open source community for any issues that we face. The document is good and we didn't have to use any support so far. We did evaluate the enterprise version and so far sticking to the free version.
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.
Informatica has a limited number of components that you can use. This places a heavy limitation on the capabilities of Informatica. On the other hand, Talend allows you to create your own custom components using Java. For businesses that need to perform a wide variety of data operations, it can be quite useful to have the option of creating your own custom components to satisfy business needs.
I delivered projects the client did not believe were possible, and I provided intermediate value by providing visibility to hidden data problems in their systems they could not detect before.
I was able to work 3 projects at a time, pausing gracefully in one while switching to the other, with minimal effort.
