dbt-core VS ploomber

dbt integration was one of our major goals early on but we found that the interaction wasn't as straightforward as had hoped.

There is an open PR in the dbt repo: https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/pull/5982#issuecomment-...

I have some ideas about future directions in this space where I believe PRQL could really shine. I will only be able to write those down in a couple of hours. I think this could be a really exciting direction for the project to grow into if anyone would like to collaborate and contribute!

> Could you share more specific details? Happy to look over / revise where needed.

Sure thing! I'd say first off, the solutions may look different for a small company/startup vs. a large enterprise. It can help if you explain the scale at which you are solving for.

On the enterprise side of things, they tend to buy solutions rather than build them in-house. Things like Informatica, Talend, etc. are common for large enterprises whose primary products are not data or software related. They just don't have the will, expertise, or the capital to invest in building and maintaining these solutions in-house so they just buy them off the shelf. On the surface, these are very expensive products, but even in the face of that it can still make sense for large enterprises in terms of the bottom line to buy rather than build.

For startups and smaller companies, have you looked at something like `dbt` (https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core) ? I understand the desire to write some code, but often times there are already existing solutions for the problems you might be encountering.

ORM's should typically only exist on the consumer-side of the equation, if at all. A lot of business intelligence / business analysts are just going to use tools like Tableau and hook up to the data warehouse via a connector to visualize their data. You might have some consumers that are more sophisticated and may want to write some custom post-processing or aggregation code, and they could certainly use ORM's if they choose, but it isn't something you should enforce on them because it's a poor place to validate data since as mentioned there are different ways/tools to access the data and not all of them are going to go through your python SDK.

Indeed in a large enough company, you are going to have producers and consumers that are going to use different tools and programming languages, so it's a little bit presumptuous to write an SDK in python there.

Another thing to talk about, and this probably mostly applies to larger companies - have you looked at an architecture like a distributed data mesh (https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-mesh-principles.html)? This might be something to bring to the CTO more than try to push for yourself, but it can completely change the landscape of what you are doing.

> More broadly is the issue of the gap of what you think the role is, and what the role actually is when you join. There are definitely cases where this is accidental. The best way I can think of to close the gap is to maybe do a short-term contract, but may be challenging to do under time constraints etc.

Yeah this definitely sucks and it's not an enviable position to be in. I guess you have a choice to look for another job or try to stick it out with the company that did this to you. It's possible there is a geniune existential crisis for the company and a good reason why they did the bait-and-switch. Maybe it pays to stay, especially if you have equity in the company. On the other hand, it could also be the case that it is the result of questionable practices at the company. It's hard to make that call.

I really dislike SQL, but recognize its importance for many organizations. I also understand that SQL is definitely testable, particularly if managed by environments such as DBT (https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core). Those who arrived here with preference to python will note that dbt is largely implemented in python, adds Jinja macros and iterative forms to SQL, and adds code testing capabilities.

3). Data Build Tool Repository.

dbt Cloud rightfully gets a lot of credit for creating dbt Core and for being the first managed dbt Core platform, but there are several entrants in the market; from those who just run dbt jobs like Fivetran to platforms that offer more like EL + T like Mozart Data and Datacoves which also has hosted VS Code editor for dbt development and Airflow.

Ahh I misunderstood, yes column level lineage is useful. DBT prefers leveraging macros which sort of breaks this pattern. I think the DBT way would be to better separate fields into upstream models and use table tracking https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/discussions/4458

Here’s the PR, which includes a what/how/why: https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/7158

I've attached a link to their documentation. DBT is becoming increasingly popular within the Data Engineering community with over 5k stars on github.

- One-click sharing powered by Ploomber Cloud: https://ploomber.io

Documentation: https://jupysql.ploomber.io

Note that JupySQL is a fork of ipython-sql; which is no longer actively developed. Catherine, ipython-sql's creator, was kind enough to pass the project to us (check out ipython-sql's README).

We'd love to learn what you think and what features we can ship for JupySQL to be the best SQL client! Please let us know in the comments!

For those who don't know, Jupyter has a bash kernel: https://github.com/takluyver/bash_kernel

And you can run Jupyter notebooks from the CLI with Ploomber: https://github.com/ploomber/ploomber

Develop notebook-based pipelines

Fair point. MLflow has a lot of features to cover the end-to-end dev cycle. This SQLite tracker only covers the experiment tracking part.

We have another project to cover the orchestration/pipelines aspect: https://github.com/ploomber/ploomber and we have plans to work on the rest of features. For now, we're focusing on those two.

I recommend taking a look at the ploomber open source. It helps you structure your code and parameterize it in a way that's easier to maintain and test. Our blog has lots of resources about it from testing your code to building a data science platform on AWS.

Developing end-to-end data science infrastructure can get complex. For example, many of us might have struggled to try to integrate AWS services and deal with configuration, permissions, etc. At Ploomber, we’ve worked with many companies in a wide range of industries, such as energy, entertainment, computational chemistry, and genomics, so we are constantly looking for simple solutions to get them started with Data Science in the cloud.

If you like working locally with notebooks, you can run via the free tier of ploomber, that'll allow you to get the Ram/Compute you need for the bigger models as part of the free tier. Also, it has the historical executions so you don't need to remember what you executed an hour later!

It really depends on your use cases, I've seen a lot of those tools that lock you into a certain syntax, framework or weird language (for instance Groovy). If you'd like to use core python or Jupyter notebooks I'd recommend Ploomber, the community support is really strong, there's an emphasis on observability and you can deploy it on any executor like Slurm, AWS Batch or Airflow. In addition, there's a free managed compute (cloud edition) where you can run certain bioinformatics flows like Alphafold or Cripresso2

That's what we do for lineage with https://ploomber.io/