[agent281]

Looking at the DBT semantic layer documentation I think I get it. The goal seems to be describing a metric that could be aggregated at multiple levels once instead of defining all of the aggregations separately.

For example, if you want to be able to aggregate revenue by subscription plan and by country over year, month or day, then you would have 6+ different aggregations. The more dimensions and time periods you add, the more the various combinations blow out. (I think the formula is dimension permutations multiplied by the number of time periods.) Having a single definition of the metrics prevents errors from occurring in rote implementations of the metrics. A bit like generics, but for queries.

At this point, I'm curious how they manage to make the integrations with different platforms work. (Ultimately, I think that's why they acquired Transform.)

[johnito]

An alternative to Transform that's done an awesome job to integrate with BI tools is Cube.js Check their website https://cube.dev

[pinkbeanz]

I think that’s still the outstanding question. Tools like Mode and Hex have already started supporting dbt’s metrics layer, but will big players like Looker and Tableau also move to support it? That’s harder to say

[rwhaling]

One of Transform's strong suits is their Tableau integration - they have really good tooling for pushing metrics out to Tableau, rather than relying on Tableau to pull them in. Apparently AirBnb was/is still a very dedicated Tableau shop.

[apahwa]

Minerva actually had really poor tableau support as of a year ago, that is something Transform improved on. Most of Minerva consumption was done via Superset, GoogleSheets, and email