dbt for BI Developers and Data Analysts

🛠 Playing Data Engineer for a Week — and Loving dbt

This week I’ve been migrating some of our Tableau custom SQL sources into dbt, and honestly — I’m starting to feel a little like a data engineer 🧰

If you’re a data analyst or BI developer and haven’t yet explored dbt, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a core piece of the modern data stack — and it’s changing the way we build and manage data transformations.

So, what is dbt?

📍dbt is the “T” in ETL — the Transform step.
It lets you:

• Write modular, maintainable SQL models

• Materialize them as views or tables

• Add automated tests to validate your data

• Document logic and dependencies

• Build DAGs to visualize data lineage

Instead of stuffing complex SQL logic into dashboards or data sources, dbt helps you bring structure, reusability, and testing to your data transformations — right where they belong: in version-controlled code.

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These types of tasks — modeling, testing, organizing SQL transformations — are often handled by analytics engineers. Analytics engineers sit between data engineers and analysts: they know SQL deeply, understand the business context, and build scalable data models that power downstream analysis.

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But here’s the thing: not every company has a dedicated analytics engineer. Many small and mid-sized teams can’t afford to split out this role. And that’s where BI developers and data analysts can step in and own part of this space.

If you’ve ever:

• Written the same SQL logic in multiple dashboards

• Had a dashboard break because someone renamed a field

• Wondered why there are five versions of “revenue”

…then learning dbt will be a game-changer for you.

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We’re currently using dbt Cloud, which is a paid, fully managed version that’s super intuitive. But you can also get started for free with dbt Core, the open-source CLI version.

dbt cloud IDE interface

It’s a fantastic tool that brings engineering best practices to data work — and I’d argue it belongs in every analyst’s toolbox 🔧

📚 Learning Resources:

Here are some resources I found helpful:

• dbt Learn – The official, free interactive course from dbt Labs (start here!). I took a couple of them, starting with dbt Fundamentals, and it was enough to get started with dbt Cloud — and even manage it as an admin.

• dbt Community Slack – Ask questions, get help, and connect with other data folks. Someone already helped me there :)

• dbt Cheat Sheet by Git Lab

• The Ultimate Guide to dbbt – Collection of resources and cheatsheets