dbt

Data Governance: the Difference Between Signal and Noise

Data governance sounds like red tape, but it’s how common rules create trust. If analytics is the story, governance is the language it’s told in. But most developers I talk to about analytics governance share the view that data governance has a public relations problem. It conjures images of committes, compliance checklists, and endless hours wasted arguing about column titles. Engineers get sweaty with daydreams of miles-long ticket queues and locked-down tables. Executives hear it and get “risk mitigation” hives as they picture momentum and morale lost to endless debate. But ironically, almost no one hears “speed”. But without governance, data teams very quickly grind to a halt. Every stack eventually hits the same wall. At first, every coded automation … Read more

9 Essential Data Cleaning Tools

Data cleaning isn’t a “nice-to-have” step before analytics. It’s the step that decides whether your dashboards become trusted decision tools or expensive fiction. The market is full of data cleaning tools that promise to purity, but they don’t all measure up. And while there’s also quite a bit of overlap in what they do (clean data), they each offer unique skills and strengths in what they do and how they do it that make a true comparison that chooses the “best data cleaning tool” a fool’s errand. This means that the end result of your search for the perfect data cleaning tool for your organization is you may end up with tools – with a capital “S”– that complement one … Read more

The Fivetran dbt Merger Makes Data Gravy

The Fivetran + dbt merger is a big deal — one of those tectonic shifts that reorders how people build data stacks. If you haven’t already heard, here’s the hot goss: In October 2025, Fivetran and dbt Labs dropped the mic: they’re merging in an all-stock deal. The combined entity is projected to have nearly $600 million ARR and serve more than 10,000 customers. Fivetran CEO George Fraser will lead the new company, while dbt’s Tristan Handy becomes cofounder + president. The merger is being framed as a “merger of equals” rather than a straight acquisition. If you’re thinking, “Wait — these two already acted like peanut butter and jelly in the modern data stack,” you’re not wrong: reports say … Read more

Data Analytics: An Overview of the Architecture

Ask ten developers what data analytics actually is, and you’ll get ten slightly different answers — each involving some combination of dashboards, SQL queries, and a vague promise of “insights.” What Is Data Analytics, Really? At its core, data analytics is the process of collecting, transforming, and interpreting data to support decision-making. That might sound abstract, but think of it as a pipeline with three distinct engineering challenges: A good analytics system automates all three. It bridges the gap between data in the wild (raw, messy, inconsistent) and data in context (structured, queryable, meaningful). Let’s go deeper… What Data Analytics Means To You Data analytics isn’t just for analysts anymore. Engineers now sit at the center of how data flows … Read more

Fivetran Automates Data Ingestion Like A Boss

There’s a moment in every data engineer’s life when they realize they’ve become a glorified cron-job babysitter. One pipeline’s down, another’s spewing duplicates, and that “temporary” Python script from 2019 is now business-critical. Then someone whispers the magic word: Fivetran. It promises a simple gospel — never build ingestion again. You point it at your data sources, pick your destination warehouse, click a few buttons, and boom — pipelines appear like it’s data Christmas. No scripts, no Airflow DAGs, no Kafka headaches. It’s the SaaS fairy tale of data engineering. And you know what? It actually delivers. What Fivetran Can Do For You This ELT Platform is the Plug-and-Play Ingestion Dream (and the Control Freak’s Nightmare) At its core, it’s … Read more

dbt Transforms Data with Discipline

dbt (Data Build Tool) has reshaped the practice of data analytics more thoroughly than any other tool. Originally a scrappy open-source project from Fishtown Analytics (now dbt Labs), dbt has evolved into the backbone of the ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) workflow, redefining how teams handle transformations inside cloud warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Databricks. Where ETL tools once extracted and transformed data before loading, it embraces the new warehouse-native approach: load everything raw, then transform it using SQL that’s modular, version-controlled, and testable. At its core, dbt doesn’t extract or load data—it assumes the warehouse already holds your raw inputs. Its genius lies in treating data transformation as software engineering, turning SQL queries into maintainable, testable, and deployable code. … Read more

Data Automation Tool Comparison

The data automation tool comparison table we’ve built below is a survey from elevation. Ie it’s neither the trees nor the forest it’s a wide-angle snapshot of the data automation ecosystem. Which means if you’re looking a broad overview of the most commonly-used tools in the modern data stack, you’re in the right place. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a more zoomed-in comparison of particular types of tools, data visuzalization tools, for example, or data cleaning tools, or data analysis tools, you’ll find those comparisons by clicking the tool category links in the comparison table below. And for the drilled-down, detailed close-read of a particular tool, click the link in the tool’s name to read my detailed … Read more