Create Your First dbt (Data Build Tool) Project

Every company that wants to make growth-oriented and customer-satisfying decisions should follow a data-driven strategy. Data provides us with completely objective information about what we are doing, how our business is performing, and how our customers feel about using our product or service. So, it is important to collect data, model it, and then leverage data as effectively as possible. When it comes to the need to model and transform data, there are two main approaches in the data engineering world: ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), and ELT (Extract, Load, Transform).

In the last years, the ELT approach has become very popular because it allows you to load raw data in your database, and then leverage the potential of the database technology in order to model and transform it. There are different technologies that enable the ELT approach, one of the most popular is dbt.

dbt stands for Data Build Tool, and it's a very powerful tool that allows you to start from raw data, apply transformations using SQL and Jinja functions (the synonym is macro), and create tables containing processed data.

In this lab, you will understand what is dbt and why it's super helpful to model and transform data. You will install it and create your first dbt project.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab, you will be able to:

• Understand the basic principles of dbt
• Install and initialize a dbt project

Intended Audience

• Data engineers with a focus on data modeling and transformations methodologies
• Developers who need a powerful tool to get insights from raw data

Prerequisites

This lab has no prerequisites.