What is dbt Data Build Tool? | What problem does it solve? | Practical use cases

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In this video I explain what dbt is and what problem it is designed to solve.

This is a high level video focused on anyone who is new to dbt and wants to get a better understanding of why it's becoming so popular.

To help explain the positioning of dbt I provide a brief history of dbt, a high-level overview of ETL vs ELT before finally wrapping up with a real-world case study from JetBlue.

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[danielperaza]

The value that you are providing is just ridiculous. Thanks for the straightforward explanation Adam

[VijayGandhi-mjvr]

Love the approach of using whiteboard and marker! Thanks for the simple yet effective intro :)

[SamridhyaMoitra]

Thanks a lot. I understood it well. Very well explained!

[agermoune]

You’re giving us data breaking news in a such an absorbed way. Thanks!

[sheenanasim]

why couldn't I find this channel earlier? amazing explanations! 10 mins into the video and I am a fan.

[ianwashere]

once you get them into the data warehouse, you can run a set of sprocs to cleanup/transform the data. don't understand yet why this is any better than just a few sql queries. I am not being negative, I really appreciate the talk.

[daniamaya]

wow! Plain and simple, just as valuable knowledge should be. Thanks!

[Anki_doodle]

your video was exactly what i was looking for. Amazing job Adam :)

[alessandroparma]

CD stands for Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment, not Development

[dzmitrybelash]

Very good and consistent intro to the dbt topic, thanks!

[chipile]

Great explanation! you won a suscriber, thanks for the content!

[Navinneroth]

Thanks Adam, Simple yet good insights on DBT. Look forward for more on this.

[sharanchandrasekaran]

Thanks for the details very informative

[livenotlive]

Great video, it will help more if you can tell why dbt should be used over snowflake native transformation options like procedure etc.?

[roberbonox]

dude how r you, i have the next question, what could i do if i have a stream on snowflake that i want to "consume" in dbt but not creating a physical table or view, instead something live a ephemeral materialization, only to purge the stream and avoid to become stale. I create an ephemeral model and select the stream source but that only create obviously an ephemeral materialization but kind not clean the data on the stream, thoughts??

[isinpresshenning]

Cloud data platforms are not the reasons why data teams started to do ELT instead of ETL. ELT has been performed by data vault practitioners since 2001.

[fahadmahmood]

Excellent explanation how DBT works for performing transformation in ELT process in snowflake

[sridhary]

Thanks Adam, it's useful and informative, I have one doubt, on Snowflake also we can do transformations, what is the reason to opt for DBT, thank you,

[jeetuburman]

Hi @adam -

I'm trying to pass a list of queries as an input to macro in my dbt project, the query is going to run on Big query in the background - I want to handle the exception in the macro - on how to through an exception if the query is having some sort of syntax issue or if table names are missing in the warehouse. I tried various ways but can't figure out a suitable solution to it. Cuz if one query is failing it is causing the process to stop, and what I want that, if a Query fails to execute it moves to the next item in the list

[emonymph]

I"m confused is DBT just a query builder?

If I use raw SQL in my webapp instead of an ORM. Where would DBT fit in? Would DBT be used to switch from raw SQL queries when fetching my data variables e.g. sql_data_python_object = raw_sql_query(against existing DB). So instead of raw_sql_query I would now write a dbt_query? But the benefit is that this query works on more DBs than say a raw pg query.

So is DBT a query builder which works like an ORM in the sense that you can use the query on any DB? If not I don't see the purpose for it when I could just use a raw SQL query on the datawarehouse after the pipeline has finished filling up the datawarehouse.