October 2021
Beginner to intermediate
256 pages
4h 38m
English
Content preview from The Informed Company
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Chapter ElevenModel Data with dbt
dbt is a lightweight but powerful open source tool built around your SQL files. Consult their online docs on how to install and get started with it. Don't worry, we're not selling you anything—the tool is free and open source.
Now, consider that you could build staging schemas without a modeling tool, but it would not be efficient for all the reasons we described earlier. dbt wraps SQL with bookkeeping and a templating language called Jinja precisely to enable teams to write all the transformations they could dream up and manage them at scale.
We'll dive into some of the central features packaged in dbt.
Version Control
Modeling data is an ongoing process. We need a way to update how the modeling code is working and make it easy to see how it was done in the past. Even better would be the ability to revert changes in case a bug is introduced. Version control provides just this.
While version control is ubiquitous in software engineering, this is still a new concept for the analytics world. We will not provide an in‐depth tutorial here but would recommend checking out the following resources:
- Emilie Schario's post—There is no such thing as a nontechnical data analyst
- Udacity's free course—Version Control with Git
Modularity and Reusability
dbt enables organizations to easily define their data in schemas. If something about business logic changes, dbt files can be updated, and, after their changes, will propagate to models and users downstream. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.