No Beginner Tutorials, Just Better Understanding Medium has a ton of great articles on dbt. Browsing through them, you’ll find about a million tutorials on how to get started. Get started with dbt on Snowflake. Up and running with dbt and BigQuery. Creating incremental tables. etc., etc., etc…. These are…

I keep reading these articles on OBT and they all claim the same false information -- That dimensional modeling was created to minimize storage and compute costs. While that was a concern, it is only a part of why we use dimensional models. If we take the simple use case…

When You Hit that Macro, Don’t Wrap It. — You really listened to Doogie Howser and countless special episodes of family sitcoms. Right? You always wrap your Jinja code in {% if execute %} blocks. If not, stop, do not pass go, and precede directly to this article to learn why you should. Now that you understand, let’s find…

Stop Sending Bad Data to Production — Here’s a conundrum for you. We write tests to prevent bad data from reaching production, but our dbt tests run after our models are created. How do we prevent bad data from reaching our downstream consumers? Traditional ETL/ELT platforms have a multitude of solutions, but many do not fit dbt…

Well You Should — It’s Elementary Elementary is a dbt package and CLI that provides a lot of infrastructure most of us would need to implement on our own. Project metadata mart? Check. Test-level Slack integration. Yup. Test and run dashboard. You betcha. Think of Elementary as the other stuff needed to maintain a data pipeline…

Introducing DBT-Fake — Learning data technologies is hard enough when we already have quality datasets to work with. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. That huge dataset at work doesn’t help you at home when you first install DBT and get through the initial Jaffleshop tutorial. Edit — Running the dbt project might…

Where Are Those Fricking Log Messages Coming From? — We’ve all been there. Our models are running. All tests pass. Yet, we keep seeing these bizarre log messages every time we run DBT. The more macros and Jinja we use, the more messages show up, even from models we aren’t running. Sometimes, the same message appears twice. How about…

The Faster More Rewarding Way To Master New Skills — We’ve all been there. Weekends wasted going through tutorials while retaining little from the experience. Did you build that todo app along with the presenter? We read blogs and watch videos about Spark or React or Painting. We take courses, but when it is time to build something real, we…

In America’s Lower Caste System — We’ve all heard it. Seen the posts. Read the ridiculous signs in front of restaurants and coffee shops. Nobody wants to work anymore. Be sure to tip extra to those who actually showed up. While these businesses truly are struggling to find workers, unemployment is historically low right now. People…