A gentle introduction to dbt


 

In a typical data warehouse project, data is loaded, transformed and stored into a data store using an ETL (extract – transform – load) process. Recently, there has been a shift to ELT processing, where data is first loaded into a data store (this can be a database, but also a data lake or something similar) and then transformed in-place.

Over the past years, the tool dbt – short for data build tool – has become quite popular in the data engineering world for handling such an ELT process. dbt takes on the role of the “T”, meaning it’s