Dbt – Incremental but Incomplete

The chaos of existing approaches was a large part of what drove me to join Materialize. With Materialize, you can use dbt on “easy-mode”, while Materialize handles incremental logic, removing the usual headaches around processing time and keeping everything up to date within a second or two.

I recently gave a talk at Data Council about this unlock, it’s total magic: https://youtu.be/pLb5sFZ7nWw

For anyone interested, my colleague Seth also discussed this in a recent blog post: https://materialize.com/blog/migrating-postgres-materialize/

You can read some case studies here https://tobikodata.com/harness.html or join Slack to meet with folks to learn more about their experiences.

Dbt introduced a language for managing these “metrics” at scale including the ability to use variables and more complex templates (Jinja.)

Then you do dbt run (https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/commands/run) and kapow the metric is populated in your database.

More broadly dbt did two other things: 1. It pushed the paradigm from ETL to ELT (so stick all the data in your warehouse and then transform it rather than transform it at extraction time.) 2. It created the concept of an “analytics engineer” (previously know as guy who knows SQL or business analyst.)

dbt is kinda like Vite (dbt = data build tool) for folks working with data warehouses. Their biggest contribution was a mindset shift that applied principles of the SDLC to the traditional BI/Analytics space.

Almost overnight, analysts went from building business logic in GUIs like Talend or Tableau to code-based models (SQL) checked into git repos instead. It took what Looker was doing with LookML and generalized it across the BI stack.

This shift (+ associated tooling) resulted in less brittle data pipelines, increased uptime for dashboards/reporting, and more sanity when working with more than 2-3 people in a data environment.

Imagine a situation where you're at an e-commerce company and need to reconcile orders from Woocommerce with shipments in ShipStation, returns from tickets in HubSpot, and refunds issued in Stripe. dbt simplifies the management of the relationships between these various systems.

Based on this, you can build data models that allow you and, increasingly, your business stakeholders to answer questions like "Which SKUs have seen an uptick in refunds due to reason X this quarter?" and "Where were they shipped?"

The benefit of having standard abstractions means you can build metrics on top of the models as [gkapur](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41853925) mentions such that "revenue" is the same when marketing pulls it for calculating CAC as when finance pulls it their monthly reports, etc.

Then it provides additional tooling around that, GUI’s, governance, everything your average large corporate asks for.