dbt-core VS superset

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.

Superset is absolutely phenomenal. I really hope Microsoft eventually releases all of their customizations they made to it internally to the OS community someday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY0SSvSUkMA

https://github.com/apache/superset/discussions/20094

I recently ran a little shootout between Superset, Metabase, and Lightdash. All have nontrivial weaknesses but I ended up picking Lightdash.

Superset the best of them at _data visualization_ but I honestly found it almost useless for self-serve _BI_ by business users. This issue on how to do joins in Superset (with stalebot making a mess XD) is everything difficult about Superset for BI in a nutshell. https://github.com/apache/superset/issues/8645

Metabase is pretty great and it's definitely the right choice for a startup looking to get low cost BI set up. It still has a very table centric view, but feels built for _BI_ rather than visualization alone.

Lightdash has significant warts (YAML, pivoting being done in the frontend, no symmetric aggregates) but the Looker inspiration is obvious and it makes it easy to present _groups of tables_ to business users ready to rock. I liked Looker before Google acquired it. My business users are comfortable with star and snowflake schemas (not that they know those words) and it was easy to drop Lightdash on top of our existing data warehouse.

Or like not being able to delete a user without running some SQL:

https://github.com/apache/superset/issues/13345

Almostl instantly run into this issue setting up a test instance of Superset. And the issue has been around for years.

Are you interested in trying out Superset, but you're intimidated by the local setup process? Worry not! Superset needs some initial setup to install locally, but I've got a streamlined way to get started - using the makefile! This file contains a set of scripts to simplify the setup process.

Recently I discovered BigQuery public datasets - just over 200 datasets available for directly querying via SQL. I think this is a great thing! I can connect these direct to an analytics platform (we use Apache Superset which uses Python SQLAlchemy under the hood) for example and just start dashboarding.

if they don't want to pay for powerbi, can try something like https://superset.apache.org/

In today's fast-paced data-driven world, organizations must analyze data in real-time to make timely and informed decisions. Real-time data analytics enables businesses to gain valuable insights, respond to real-time events, and stay ahead of the competition. Also, the analytics engine must be capable of running analytical queries and returning results in real-time. In this article, we will explore how you can build a real-time data analytics solution using the open-source tools Redpanda a distributed streaming platform, Apache Superset, a data visualization, and a business intelligence platform, combined with RisingWave a streaming database.