Awesome dbt

Welcome to the awesome curated list of dbt resources!

Any kind of contribution is greatly encouraged and appreciated. For making a contribution, please check the contribution guidelines first! Add new entries on the top of sections (LIFO) to keep fresh items more visible! Also, feel free to add new sections.

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Contents

• Get Started
• How To
• Integrations
• User Stories
• Data Quality
• CI/CD
• Orchestration
• Utilities
• Packages
• Community
• Sample Projects
• Contributors

Get Started

Courses from where you can get started with Analytics Engineering.

• dbt in a real world scenario, A Beginner dbt tutorial - A beginner tutorial to understand dbt with a real world example.
• Analytics Engineering Glossary - Living collection of terms & concepts commonly used in the data industry by dbt Labs.
• Zero to Hero dbt - Complete course covering both theory & practice through real-world Airbnb use-case.
• Data Engineering Zoomcamp - Data engineering course on cutting edge tools including dbt.
• Analytics Engineering with dbt - Paid course offered by co:rise covering the basics of dbt.
• dbt Fundamentals - Official free course offered by dbt. Excellent for learning the basics of dbt Cloud.
• Refactoring SQL for Modularity - Another dbt labs offered free course on dbt refactoring and CTE supercharging.
• Learn DBT from Scratch - Guides you through a setup paired with Snowflake (decorated with extras).

How To

Helping hand on setting up integrations and implementing best practices.

• dbt Monorepo Workflow - How to get started with the team dbt workflow.
• Configuring Snowflake warehouse sizes in dbt - How to use dbt with Snowflake to allow specific warehouses to be chosen down to the model level.
• BigQuery Ingestion-Time Partitioning and Partition Copy With dbt - Combining ingestion-time partitioning and partition copy is a great way to achieve better performance for your models.
• Power up your data quality with grouped checks - How to use grouped checkes in dbt-utils to keep our data "on track".
• Dry running our data warehouse using BigQuery and dbt - Use dbt & BigQuery dry run jobs to validate our 1000+ models in under 30 seconds.
• Automatically generate ERD - Automatically generate ERDs and display in your docs site.
• Business Intelligence Standards - Best practices in Business Intelligence standards for integrating with dbt.
• Jinja cheatsheet - Jinja cheatsheet for dbt development.
• Test SQL Pipelines against Production Clones using DBT and Snowflake - Leverage Snowflake Zero-copy-clones to run slim ci checks.
• How we structure our dbt projects - How the dbt team structures its dbt projects.
• dbt guide - Primer on how you should properly set up and configure your dbt workflow.
• dbt for Data Transformation – Hands-on - Yet another tutorial for using dbt Cloud.
• Start Modeling Data - Configuring Bigquery with your dbt project.
• Accelerating Data Teams with dbt & Snowflake - A dbt & Snowflake workshop on financial data.
• Creating a dev environment quickly on Snowflake - Setting up teh integraton with Snowflake.
• How to set up a dbt data-ops workflow, using dbt cloud and Snowflake - Leverage GitHub Actions to set up CI/CD with dbt Core.
• How to configure your dbt repository - Mono-repo or not mono-repo?
• Best Practices for Optimizing Your dbt and Snowflake Deployment - Pocket guide on optimization best practices with Snowflake.
• How to Deploy dbt to Production using GitHub Actions
• Doing More With Less: Using DBT to load data from AWS S3 to Snowflake via External Tables - An alternative guide to set up your dbt-external-tables workflow.
• Best Practices for your dbt Style Guide - Standards for well organized base layer with Airbyte ingestion.
• Tips and Tricks about working with dbt - Tips from community members.
• Writing Unit Tests for dbt - An overview about the package dbt-unit-testing.

Integrations

Collection of known data integrations with dbt

• Datafold - Gives a quick print out summary of changes so you can move fast and (not) break stuff!
• Raycast dbt Metadata - Queries the dbt Cloud API to return some useful information about your models (number of tests, time they took to run etc…).
• Cube - APIs, Caching, and Access Control on top of dbt Metrics.
• FlexIt Analytics - Business Intelligence platform with deep dbt Cloud and CLI integration.
• Raycast dbt Jobs - Raycast integration to monitor dbt Cloud Jobs.
• Metaplane - Data Observaibility layer on top of your dbt + BI project.
• Dbt + Machine Learning: What makes a great baton pass? - Landscape of ML utilities around dbt.
• Soda - Integration of Soda's data observability platform and dbt.
• Supported Adapters - Offically supported database adapters.
• Lightdash - Open source Looker alternative with deep dbt integration.
• Superset - Open source visualization layer for your Modern Data Stack.
• Dagster and dbt: Better Together - Getting started with the dagster-dbt library.
• fal - Add multi-language support (Python) to your dbt project.
• Privacy Dynamics - Anonymize data in your dbt project.
• prefect-dbt - Collection of Prefect integrations for working with dbt with your Prefect flows.

User Stories

Use-cases and user stories implemented by the community members using components of the MDS with dbt.

• "Semantic-free" is the future of Business Intelligence - How to leverage dbt as a data catalog and semantic layer (joins, synonyms, etc.) that BI tools can just plug into.
• Building an extension framework for dbt - How Monzo built an extension framework for dbt.
• Why I moved my dbt workloads to GitHub and saved over $65,000 - Save by replacing dbt Cloud with GitHub Actions.
• “Is This You?” Entity Matching in the Modern Data Stack with Large Language models - An experiment in productionizing LLMs.
• How HomeToGo connected dbt and Superset to make metadata more accessible and reduce analytical overhead - A dbt<>Superset connector that leverages Superset's API capabilities and dbt's manifest.
• Self-service Business Intelligence - Eliminate the need for a data modeling semantic layer in BI.
• Leveraging DBT as a Data Modeling tool - Reflection on one-year usage of dbt.
• dbt + Materialize: Streaming to a dbt project near you - How to own your real-time transformation workflows like batch-based alternatives.
• Who's really using dbt? - Behind the community of analytics engineers.
• dbt and the Analytics Engineer — what's the hype about - Behind the upheaval of the analytics engineer profession.
• Analyzing Fishtown's dbt project performance with artifacts - Using project artifacts to identify anomalies and room for refactoring.
• Deploying and Running dbt on Azure Container Instances - Demonstration of integration with Azure.
• Beware of DBT Incremental Updates Against Snowflake External Tables - Things you should be aware of when using external tables with dbt.
• dbt development at Vimeo - Best practises from the Vimeo Data team.

Data Quality

Best-practices and extensions of the testing framework.

• BigQuery Stale data detection - Stale data detection with dbt and BigQuery dataset metadata.
• PipeRider - PipeRider allows you to define the shape of your data once, and then use the data checking functionality to alert you to changes in your data quality.
• Elementary - A dbt package that provides data anomaly detection as dbt tests.
• Environment-dependent Unit Testing in dbt - Guide on how to run unit tests in dbt dynamically.
• dbt-expectations - Port between dbt and great_expectations to extend out-of-the-box tests.
• re_data - A dbt package for montioring metrics and detect anomalies.
• How do you test your data - Suggestions on testing your data powered by the community.
• How to unit test sql transforms in dbt - Unit test using source defer and generic custom tests.

CI/CD

Make the best out of your product quality and seamless delivery.

• Autoscaling CI - The intelligent Slim CI.
• Slim CI/CD with Bitbucket Pipelines - How to setup slim CI on Bitbucket.
• dbt-docs-to-notion - A GitHub action for exporting dbt model docs to a Notion database.
• Anatomy of A Pipeline: CI/CD For a dbt Data Warehouse on Google Big Query Using Azure Pipelines - Setting up CI/CD for a Big Query Stack using Azure Pipelines.
• Continuous Integration and Automated Build Testing with dbtCloud - Great and detailed blogpost on setting up Slim CI in dbt Cloud.
• How to review an analytics pull request - Checkpoints to consider when reviewing an analytics engineer PR.
• Performing a blue/green deploy of your dbt project on Snowflake - A very tidy and fail-safe way to run dbt in production by using two parallel production enviromnents.
• How we speed up our CI runs by 10x using Slim CI - Limit data in long-running CI checks to improve developing experience.

Orchestration

Resources to manage and maintain dependencies in modern data pipelines.

• Building a Scalable Analytics Architecture with Airflow and dbt - Leveraging the dbt manifest in Airflow.
• Auto-generating an Airflow DAG using the dbt manifest - Yet another article on extracting value from the manifest file.
• Building a robust data pipeline with the dAG stack: dbt, Airflow, Great Expectations - Demonstration of a data orchestration project with Airflow.
• Run dbt in Azure Data Factory - Primer about dbt on Azure Data Stack.

Utilities

Useful tools and extensions to bump up your analytics engineer worklow.

• dbt-feature-flags - Feature Flags in dbt models.
• dbtpal - A Neovim plugin for dbt model editing.
• cookiecutter-dbt - Cookiecutter template for dbt projects.
• turbovault4dbt - TurboVault4dbt is an open source tool that automatically generates dbt models according to datavault4dbt-templates.
• dbtvault-generator - Generate DBT Vault files from yml metadata (supporting dbtvault package).
• dbt-container-skeleton - All the basics to get a nice containerized dbt development environment.
• oliver-twist - DAG auditing tool that audits the DBT DAG and generates a summary report.
• dbt-sql-formatter - Makes your sql less bad.
• dbterd - CLI to generate DBML file from dbt manifest.json.
• dbt-cue - Generate dbt yml files using the CUE language.
• VSC - Wizard for dbt Core - This extension accelerates your first-time environment setup with dbt Core, and optimizes your continual development of transformation pipelines.
• dbt-artifacts-parser - It enables us to deal with catalog.json, manifest.json, run-results.json and sources.json as python objects.
• GitHub Action: Cancel Running CI Job - This allows to always have the newest code commit running in the CI job without having to wait for the stale job runs to finish.
• dbtc - Unaffiliated python interface to various dbt Cloud API endpoints.
• dbt-osmosis - Enhance the developer experience significantly with workbench, output diffs, and YAML management.
• pytest-dbt-core - Pytest dbt core is a pytest plugin for testing your dbt projects.
• looker-gen - Generate lookml from dbt.
• dbtenv - A version manager for dbt.
• sqlfmt - This tool formats your dbt SQL code so you don't have to.
• SQLFluff - SQL linter that supports dbt and Jinja templating.
• Build Data Access Layer on dbt - Package to build GraphQL API on top of your dbt project.
• Run changed models based on Git status - Handy bash function to run changed models since last commit.
• How we set up our computers for working on dbt projects - Things I wish I would have known when started working with dbt. Tools and hacks to improve developing experience.
• fzf-dbt - Search dbt models interactively from terminal.
• vscode-dbt-power-user - VSCode extension to give more clarity on model dependencies.
• Your Essential dbt Project Checklist - Checklist on items necessary for a successful dbt project.
• dbt Style Guide - Developing styleguide often referred in PR templates.
• Clean your warehouse of old and deprecated models - Clean out warehouse models which are not existent in the project.
• dbt-tips - Excellent companion to your dbt practice with rich collection of tips.
• dbt-tags - Understanding the scopes of dbt tags.
• Pre-commit hooks - Pre-commit hooks for checking data integity before schema change commit.

Packages

Community-developed packages to extend default macros and toolset.

• dbt_linreg - Linear regression in SQL using dbt.
• dbt-snowflake-query-tags - Automatically tag dbt-issued queries with informative metadata.
• snowflake-resource-monitoring - Yet another package to monitor Snowflake usage.
• usagedata - Provides insights on the database/table level usage informations from Snowflake.
• dbt_ml - Package for dbt that allows users to train, audit and use BigQuery ML models.
• ddbt - This repo represents my attempt to build a fast version of DBT which gets very slow on large projects (3000+ data models). This project attempts to be a direct drop in replacement for DBT at the command line.
• dbt-snowflake-monitoring - A dbt package to help you monitor Snowflake performance and costs.
• datavault4dbt - Macros for staging and creation of all DataVault-Entities you need, to build your own DataVault2.0 solution.
• DDO - Perform DataOps & administrative CI/CD on your data warehouse.
• dbt-yaml-check - Checks that columns defined in YAML also exist in SQL.
• data-diff - A command-line tool and Python library to efficiently diff rows across two different databases.
• dbt-project-evaluator - This package highlights areas of a dbt project that are misaligned with dbt Labs' best practices.
• dbt_constraints - Generate database constraints based on the tests in a dbt project.
• dbt-date - Date logic and calendar functionality.
• dbt-privacy - Macros to make it easier to protect your customers' data.
• dbt-fivetran-utils - General macros and helpers.
• dbt_metrics - Macros to support secondary calculations and generate business metrics.
• dbt-metabase - Model synchronization from dbt to Metabase.
• dbt-coves - CLI tool for generating a scaffold for your dbt project.
• dbt-profiler - Data profiling and doc block generator.
• dbt_utils - General macros library. A must have.
• dbt_audit_helper - Macros for data audits that compare columns values and schemas between tables.
• dbt-ml-preprocessing - A SQL port of python's scikit-learn preprocessing module, provided as cross-database dbt macros.
• dbt-external-tables - Macros to stage your external sources.
• dbt-feature-store - Macros to build a feature store right within your dbt project.
• dbt-codegen - Macros that generate dbt code, and log it to the command line.
• dbt-init - Create a project and populate as much of the dbt project as possible.
• dbt-artifacts - This package builds a mart of tables from dbt artifacts loaded into a table.
• dbt-erdiagram-generator - This packages generate ERD diagrams from a dbt project.
• Terraform-dbt Cloud Module - IAC in dbt Cloud via Terraform.
• dbt2looker - Generate Looker views for dbt models.
• dbt-coverage - Checks dbt docs and tests coverage.
• dbt-meta-testing - Yet another coverage testing.
• dbt-superset-lineage - Push and pull metadata between dbt to Superset.
• dbtvault - Package for generating and executing ETL for Data Vault 2.0.
• dbt-invoke - CLI for creating, updating, and deleting dbt property files.
• dbt-unit-testing - Package which contains macros to support unit testing.

Community

Conferences, meetups, dicussions, newsletters, podcasts, etc. led by fellow analytics engineers and forums of contact.

• State of Analytics Engineering 2023 - A survey of pains, gains, and areas of investment for global data teams.
• dbt Labs Tiktok - Official TikTok channel of dbt Labs.
• Locally Optimistic - A Slack community of aspiring analytics leaders discussing and sharing lessons learned and challenges from their experiences in using data.
• DataTalks.Club - Global online community of data enthusiasts. Podcasts and blogs, etc. are distributed with high frequency.
• Metadata Weekly - Weekly substack about metadata, the metrics layer and MDS.
• Data & Analytics Events in 2022 - Great curated list of upcoming data analytics conferences.
• Data Council Austin 2022 - Worldwide community driven analytics conference with a handful of talks fitting to the dbt stack.
• Discourse v2 - Revamped and ported hub of main discussions for the community.
• Coalesce 2021 - Second iteration of the analytics engineer conference.
• Coalesce 2020 - Annual dbt conference full of fascinating use-cases.
• dbt meetups - List of community led dbt meetups.
• Analytics Engineer Roundup - Official dbt Labs newsletter on topics of the MDS.
• Benn Stacil's Newsletter - Tought-provoking reads from founder of Mode.
• Data Engineering Weekly - Weekly newsletter of recent trends in Data Engineering.
• Data Engineering Podcast - One of the most popular data engineering podcasts covering great concepts and new products.
• Analyitics Engineer Podcast - Official podcast of dbt Labs.
• dbt Slack - Energy-filled hub of analytics engineers (Highly recommended).
• r/dataengineering - Subreddit of data engineering topics.
• Drill to Detail Podcast - Special guests discussing big data, business intelligence, modern data stack.

Sample Projects

Sample projects which work out-of-the box. Reflect use-cases publicly available.

• Analytics Engineer Survey 2023 - Repo containing data and dbt template of the survey.
• Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market with Dagster, dbt and BigQuery - Explore the topic of fake GitHub stars.
• Data-aware orchestration - Dagster's ability to create a global dependency graph between different dbt projects.
• GitLab Data Team - Gitlab's open source dbt project.
• attribution-playbook - A worked example to demonstrate how to model customer attribution.
• mrr-playbook - A worked example to demonstrate how to model subscription revenue.
• Use dbt inside Visual Studio Code development containers - Set up your dbt environment with pre-installed extensions.
• dag-stack - Dbt-Airflow-GreatExpectations Stack.
• Jaffle Shop - A self-contained dbt project for testing purposes.
• Spotify User Analytics - Sample dbt project with Spotify user data.
• dbt-github-workflow - Deploy BigQuery + Airflow.
• airflow-dbt-demo - Demonstration of Airflow integration.
• aws athena x dbt - How to build a small and modern data infrastructure.
• dbt on AWS - Data Build Tool (dbt) for Effective Data Transformation on AWS
  • Part 1 – Redshift
  • Part 2 – Glue
  • Part 3 – EMR on EC2
  • Part 4 – EMR on EKS
  • Part 5 – Athena

Contributors

Thanks for all the great resources! Can't see your avatar? Check the contribution guide on how you can submit your resources to the community!