wtf is dbt? [Drew Banin]

<p>dbt is taking the data eng world by storm. this is the best 10 minutes i've heard on it, from Fishtown Analytics cofounder Drew Banin.</p><p>Fun fact: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishtown,_Philadelphia">Fishtown is a town in Philadelphia</a>!</p><p><strong>Audio source:</strong> <a href="https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/dbt-data-analytics-episode-81/">https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/dbt-data-analytics-episode-81/</a> (14 mins in)</p><p>Fivetran CEO geeking out on dbt: <a href="https://medium.com/hashmapinc/the-origins-and-future-of-fivetran-with-george-fraser-1af8e7cb90aa">https://medium.com/hashmapinc/the-origins-and-future-of-fivetran-with-george-fraser-1af8e7cb90aa</a> (17 mins in)</p><p><strong>Transcript</strong></p><p>Tobias Macey: And also, we don't have this version repository of queries and reports and the ability to collaborate on it fairly easily, then you end up leaving everyone to write their own sequel, usually ad hoc, and they might have their own assumptions as to what an order is or what a customer is, or how to structure the query to join across different tables. And so everybody's going to have slightly different views of the data or slightly different outputs. And so definitely having the ability to have one location that everybody can look to. And one interface for everybody to collaborate on makes it much easier and more scalable to have more people working on building and interacting with these Analytics reports and these analytics pipelines.</p><p>Drew Bannon: Absolutely, I think it's a great point, what we find is that in the process of building up these data models, what you're actually doing is generating knowledge about your organization. And you're saying here's exactly what an order is, or here's exactly how we calculate MRR. And to that end, dbt ships with auto generated documentation about your project, you can run dbt docs generate, to generate this single page app, have all of your models with all the tests on the columns and descriptions that