Understanding dbt for Data Series

Leo Godin
2 min readSep 23, 2023

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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 much needed and good, but they’ve been covered in depth. We need more intermediate and advanced content that expands our understanding of dbt, patterns, and best practices.

This is where my articles will fit. While, you may see a few posts helping people learn dbt. That will not be the focus. Instead, you should find articles that move you from memorizing commands and syntax, to getting it. What are common patterns used to solve problems? How does dbt work? How can we implement dbt in a way that adds value? These are the types of things I want to share. And to that end, most of what I write will fall into the following categories.

How Dbt Works

Articles that provide foundational understanding of dbt. Instead of solving specific problems, these posts will focus on architecture, run time, and other parts of the black box.

Tools and Miscellaneous

We all have our favorite tools and dbt packages. This category will demonstrate ones I like.

Advanced Dbt Testing

This is an area I spend a lot of time in. We can go so much further than the built-in tests and packages. Here we will discuss various methods for more effective DQ and code testing.

Dbt Quick Patterns

Short, concise articles showing how to solve common problems with simple solutions.

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Leo Godin
Leo Godin

Written by Leo Godin

I’m Leo and I love data! Recovering mansplainer, currently working as a lead data engineer at New Relic. BS in computer science and a MS in data