Community News Bringing back the magic to the dbt community — part one We’re taking some steps to bring back the ✨magic ✨ in the dbt community. First stop — focusing the different ways the dbt community interacts with each other.
Company News Four Years In: From Misfits to Mainstream dbt is no longer a niche product and dbt Slack is no longer a community of misfits...we’ve gone mainstream, folks.
How-To How to find a role in analytics engineering This article is written for job seekers. I’ve gathered a lot of data over the course of a month-long search and learned about what the landscape looks like for the analytics engineer hiring pipeline.
How-To The farm-to-table testing framework: How to catch data quality issues before they break your dashboards A holistic data testing framework to help you catch data quality issues before they impact your stakeholders.
Company News We're cancelling Coalesce. Here's what to expect instead. For the foreseeable future, all in-person dbt events are cancelled. But we have some good stuff in the works.
Company News Four years in (and it’s a strange time to celebrate) dbt is four years old, and we are so grateful for the community that has grown alongside this project.
How-To Modeling marketing attribution Marketing attribution has long been one of the stickiest problems in analytics. But with raw data, SQL, and dbt a previously complex problem can become beautifully simple.
Company News Announcing Coalesce 2020 Coalesce 2020, the first global conference for analytics engineers, will be held in NYC from August 20–21st. Tickets go on sale today. It’s going to be a very special event.
How-To Modeling subscription revenue If you’re a data analyst at a SaaS company or an ecommerce business with a subscription component, it is inevitable that you will be asked to analyze metrics like churn, upgrades, and downgrades. Here's how to do this with dbt.
Company News Analytics engineering for everyone The inability to bridge the chasm between IT and the business is the core dysfunction in modern data teams, and it’s also the biggest opportunity for progress.
Company News Announcing the dbt IDE With the dbt Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) you can orchestrate the entire analytics engineering workflow in your browser.
How-To How great data teams test their data models Analytics code is code. Which means that it will have bugs. And without rigorous processes in place to find and eliminate those bugs, code quality will degrade over time.
Building data teams How should I structure my data team? A look inside HubSpot, Away, M.M. LaFleur, and more The data team is a brand new thing: it’s not “IT”, it’s not finance, it’s not any of the typical business functions within an operating business. So...who does it report to? How does it interact with the rest of the organization? How big is it?
Building data teams When did analytics engineering become a thing? And why? Analytics engineers provide clean data sets to end users, modeling data in a way that empowers end users to answer their own questions. Here are the market trends that gave rise to the newest role on modern data teams.
Building data teams The four priorities of a one-person analytics team: lessons from Lola.com Meet Sagar Velagala, Operations Manager at Lola.com. He's a one-person analytics team at a fast-growing, ~100 person company. Here's the analytics strategy that underpins his success.
Opinion Write better SQL: In defense of group by 1 My love for group by 1, 2 developed when I was a fledgling analyst and has only grown. Even if you disagree, I hope this rant will inspire you to be more opinionated in your SQL style.
Opinion Analytics Engineering: Operating with Leverage If your time is valuable, it should be important to you to operate with the highest possible leverage. This allows you to get more done with your fixed number of hours. Simple. Here's how analysts can operate with leverage.
How-To Four questions to help accurately scope analytics engineering projects Data teams are successful when they build reserves of trust. One important way to build trust is by consistently delivering projects on time. Here are four questions we've found to be useful in helping us spot the potholes that derail analytics engineering projects.
How-To How to track data changes with dbt snapshots All data analysts have faced the problem–how do I model data when the record in the data warehouse keeps changing? In this post, I'll cover how to solve this using dbt snapshots.
How-To How to review an analytics pull request Version control is a critical part of the software engineering workflow, but for many analysts, writing and reviewing pull requests is still a relatively new habit. Here's a checklist we use to review analytics PRs.
Building data teams How to hire an analytics engineer Modern data warehouses have upended the way that data teams function. Increasingly, companies are hiring a new kind of technical analyst to bridge the gap between data engineers and data analysts. Here's why and how you can hire one too.
How-To Data testing: why you need it and how to get started Advice from analysts and data engineers at HubSpot, Managed by Q, GitLab, Wong Decision Intelligence, AskWonder, and Calogica
How-To How Monzo, the UK’s favorite mobile-only bank, is rolling out dbt Stephen Whitworth, Data Engineering Lead at Monzo, spoke at the London dbt Meetup a few weeks ago. Here are my thoughts on his talk and what the dbt community can learn from it.
Opinion Five principles that will keep your data warehouse organized The natural state of the universe is chaos: entropy tends to increase in closed systems, and there’s really nothing that we can do about that. So too is the nature of data warehouses: unless action is taken to maintain order.
