[pbowyer]

Can someone do a better job than the dbt homepage and explain what this is and _why I would need it?_ The pictures show SQL being generated using a templating language - when do I want that?

From the other comments it's clearly popular but I've never come across it in use.

[trumpeta]

ELT approach means you copy raw data from transactional sources, events, external APIs and dump it in the first “layer” of your data warehouse.

Then you progressively clean it and model it into some format that is easily usable for dashboards or self service analytics.

To do that you build a DAG of SQL scripts and dbt makes that easy through templating, macros and automatically generated docs.

You still have to execute the DAG somehow and here you either use their OSS version and schedule it with anything from Github Actions to Airflow, OR you buy their Cloud offering

[Aeolun]

I guess it’s a way to stop former dba’s and etl people from just storing their queries/stored procedures all over the place?

[mjirv]

It’s (mostly) for data analytics teams, not software engineers.

They use it to transform raw data in their data warehouses into views/tables that people can use for analysis.

[Jgrubb]

It is, for me and my team, a framework for building out and maintaining a data warehouse much like Rails is a framework for building out a web app.