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dbt (data build tool): Transforming Your Analytics Engineering Workflow

dbt has become the standard for analytics engineering. Learn how it brings software engineering best practices — testing, documentation, and version control — to SQL transforms.

What is dbt?

dbt (data build tool) allows analytics engineers to write SQL SELECT statements and dbt handles the materialisation — creating views, tables, or incremental models in your data warehouse automatically.

Why Teams Love dbt

  • Version Control: All SQL models live in a Git repository, enabling code review and rollback.
  • Testing: Define schema tests (not null, unique, referential integrity) that run automatically with every deployment.
  • Documentation: Auto-generate a data catalogue with column descriptions and lineage graphs from your model files.
  • Lineage: Visualise the full dependency tree from raw source tables to final BI-ready models.