Doing analytics is hard. Doing analytics right is even harder.
There are a massive number of factors to consider: Is data missing? How do we make this insight discoverable? Why is my database locked? Are we even asking the right questions?
Compounding this is the fact that analytics can sometimes feel like a lonely pursuit.
Sure, our data is generally proprietary and therefore we can’t talk much about it. But we certainly can share what we’ve learned about working with that data.
So let’s all commit to sharing our hard won knowledge with each other—and in doing so pave the path for the next generations of analytics practitioners.
Welcome to the dbt Developer Blog
The purpose of this blog is to double down on our long running commitment to contributing to the knowledge loop.
From early posts like ‘The Startup Founders Guide to Analytics’ to foundational guides like ‘How We Structure Our dbt Projects’, we’ve had a long standing goal of working with the community to create practical, hands-on tutorials and guides which distill the knowledge we’ve been able to collectively gather.
dbt as a product is based around the philosophy that even the most complicated problems can be broken down into modular, reusable components, then mixed and matched to create something novel.
This blog represents the exact same philosophy, just applied via the lens of written guides rather than code. Our knowledge grows strongest when we bounce ideas off of each other: no idea is too small, something that’s old hat to you may spark something big in someone else.
A Note on "Best Practices"
A critical part of making knowledge sharing successful is understanding that many ideas are a work in progress—think of posts here less as canonical declarations of truth, and more as point-in-time snapshots of the writer’s thinking.
The goal is for each post here to have at least one new reusable piece of knowledge that you can return to again and again throughout your work.
The Types of Posts You’ll Find Here
A brief overview of the types of posts that you will find on the blog:
Analytics Craft: The art of being an analytics practitioner.
dbt Tutorials: Best practices in the usage of our favorite data transformation tool.
Data Ecosystem: Walkthroughs of how top data practitioners use tools in the modern data stack.
Product Updates: An archive of monthly product updates from the dbt Labs team.
SQL Magic: Stories of dbt developers making SQL sing across warehouses
Get Involved
Analytics engineering is a relatively young skillset, and many of the basic tenets and patterns are still in the process of being discovered. There is not yet a canonical set of patterns to implement and processes to follow in order to guarantee success.
So! We hope this blog can provide a platform for community learning and knowledge sharing.
The insights to get there cannot come from any one individual or organization - for this project to be successful, they have to integrate the collective knowledge of a diverse set of voices from within the analytics community.
If you are interested in contributing, requesting topics or just looking at what is coming down the road on the blog, check out the dbt Developer Blog repo. This repo contains all the information you need to get involved and get started, including the Discussions board where you can propose new topics for posts.
Together, we will begin to write the playbooks to ensure any organization has access to the accumulated knowledge of the analytics engineering community.
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