Rittman Analytics and dbt : Consulting Partnership and News on dbt Learn London
By: Mark Rittman
Tags: Data Modeling, Analytics, Software Development, Looker, Dbt

We’re very pleased to announce that Rittman Analytics is now an official Consulting Partner for dbt, working with our clients, the community and the wider dbt ecosystem to get the most out of this open-source analytics framework and accompanying commercial dbtCloud service.

We also have news of a special dbt Learn training event taking place in London on October 24th and 25th 2019 with Rittman Analytics sponsoring the event reception … and a special registration discount for readers of our blog.

So What, Exactly, is dbt?

As Tristan Handy wrote in a blog post around this time last year,

“dbt (data build tool) is an open-source tool and accompanying commercial web service that enables data analysts and engineers to transform data in their warehouses more effectively and own the entire analytics engineering workflow. dbt is the “T” in the Extract, Load and Transform (“ELT”) data architecture. It doesn’t extract or load data, but it’s extremely good at transforming data that’s already loaded into your warehouse. This “transform after load” architecture is becoming known as ELT (extract, load, transform), and dbt fits nicely into the modern BI stack, coupling with products like Looker, Stitch, Fivetran, Google BigQuery, Github and Snowflake Data Warehouse.”

Today, dbt has ~280 companies using it in production, including companies like Casper, Seatgeek, and Wistia in the US and several of our clients in UK and Europe — and ourselves, as we talk about in our recent blog post on How Rittman Analytics does Analytics.

To accompany the dbt open-source toolkit and available as a paid-for cloud service, dbtCloud is used for managing your analytics engineering workflow in one place and includes features for scheduling, monitoring and creating CI/CD (“Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery”) test pipelines.

dbt Learn London 24/25–10–2019 : Special Offer

dbt Learn is a two-day, in-person training program running in London on October 24th and 25th 2019 that teaches analysts the tools and knowledge needed to own the entire analytics engineering workflow. Taught by the Fishtown Analytics team and with Rittman Analytics as event reception sponsors, analysts will walk away with a practical foundation in data warehouse management, modeling strategies, automated testing, performance optimisation, and much more. The only technical requirement is a practical knowledge of SQL.

You can read more about dbt Learn in this blog post from Fishtown Analytics, and use the promo code RITTMANANALYTICS when you register on the event website to get $200 off of the standard course price. Spaces are strictly limited, and you can join us for a drinks and canapés reception at the end of the first day to network and share your dbt experiences — more details are on the event page here.

Rittman Analytics and dbt

Rittman Analytics has implemented dbt and dbtCloud on several client projects in scenarios such as

transforming event-based (Segment, mParticle), data pipeline (Stitch, Fivetran) and batch-loaded raw data sourced from SaaS, Telco, web application and other data sources

using Snowflake Data Warehouse, Postgres and Google BigQuery as sources/targets

integrating with GitHub, AWS CodeCommit for local/remote branch-based git development

creation of automated CI/CD dbt build test pipelines using dbtCloud and AWS CodeBuild/CodePipeline

Finally, if you’re new to dbt or interested in how we use dbt and dbtCloud both internally and on client projects, check out our three recent blog posts on this topic to get a sense of what dbt and our services can do for your business.