dbt is THE way to manage your SQL transformations - version control and all kinds of other tools!
September 21, 2022

dbt is THE way to manage your SQL transformations - version control and all kinds of other tools!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

dbt Developer

Overall Satisfaction with dbt

I'm now adapting ALL my data transformations in my Fivetran -> Snowflake -> visualizations data pipelines using dbt. The productivity gains + better accuracy/fewer bugs introduced are HUGE. There's definitely some upfront work to learn dbt (not hard if you're already a SQL expert AND if you have a little git or coding familiarity), but man is it worth it!

Pros

  • SQL Transformation
  • Data pipeline management
  • SQL data warehouse management

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
  • Easy of use
  • Supports good coding principles (DRY, for example) and dev vs prod environments
  • Testing of data!
  • Dbt saves me an incredible amount of time building & managing data pipeline.
  • I feel like dbt replaces at least 1 FTE data engineer on our team, and does it better.
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.

Do you think dbt delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with dbt's feature set?

Yes

Did dbt live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of dbt go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy dbt again?

Yes

Dbt is a revelation for the analytics/BI engineering space. The seamless version control and 'don't repeat yourself' tools make your data and analytics pipelines WAY more reliable and efficient. Build data like a developer!

dbt Feature Ratings

Simple transformations
10
Complex transformations
10
Data model creation
10
Metadata management
7
Business rules and workflow
7
Collaboration
Not Rated
Testing and debugging
10

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