Item: dbt
Rating: 10
Author: Sahil Khan

Overall Satisfaction with dbt

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At [...], dbt (Data Build Tool) is used for data transformation in the ELT processes. As [...] is a data rich company, there are lot of instances where the data needs to be transformed after it is loaded into the data warehouse and dbt handles this perfectly. dbt helps our company to maintain data quality with its transformation capabilities using the SQL queries.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

dbt can improve their debugging and error messaging.
dbt does not support python based transformation which are needed in advanced cases like machine learning.
dbt should provide the feature of query cost estimation and usage reports to reduce high compute cost.

Return on Investment

With dbt the data transformation is now faster which ultimately improves the time to insights.
dbt has reduced the cost compared to other traditional ETL tools.
Data quality and reliability of [...] has improved with dbt.

Usability

dbt is highly usable for data analyst and data engineers working in modern cloud data stack. As dbt is SQL based it allows data analyst to create transformation logic without relying on the data engineers. dbt provides built in checks which helps to maintain high data quality. dbt can generate documentation and data lineage graph which gives an overview of how data flows through models.

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of dbt go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy dbt again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Atlassian Confluence, Numerator TruView, Apache Airflow

Likelihood to Recommend

dbt (Data Build Tool) is best suited for doing the data transformation. dbt is just a transformation tool and it is not suitable for building a data pipeline which requires extraction of data and loading. dbt is well suited for SQL based transformation logic and it is less appropriate when transformation logic requires python.

dbt Feature Ratings

Comments

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dbt - a great data transformation tool in data pipelines

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