Alternatives to dbt logo

Alternatives to dbt

act, Airflow, Looker, Apache Spark, and Slick are the most popular alternatives and competitors to dbt.
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What is dbt and what are its top alternatives?

Dbt (data build tool) is an open-source tool that enables data analysts and engineers to transform data in their warehouses by writing SQL queries. Key features include data transformation workflows, version control, testing, documentation, and a powerful CLI. However, some limitations of dbt include limited support for non-SQL transformations, lack of real-time processing capabilities, and a steeper learning curve for beginners.

  1. Airflow: Apache Airflow is a platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows. Key features include workflow automation, extensibility, and rich ecosystem of integrations. Pros include advanced scheduling capabilities and a wide range of integrations, while cons include complex setup and configuration.
  2. Prefect: Prefect is a workflow management system designed for modern infrastructure. Key features include dynamic workflows, parameterization, and advanced monitoring. Pros include simplicity and flexibility, while cons include a smaller community compared to other tools.
  3. Dagster: Dagster is a data orchestration system for machine learning, analytics, and ETL. Key features include data pipelines, declarative configuration, and testing. Pros include a focus on data quality and seamless integration with ML frameworks, while cons include a newer tool with less extensive documentation.
  4. Singer: Singer is an open-source framework for ETL that allows you to easily move data between systems. Key features include modular taps and targets, easy extensibility, and simple configuration. Pros include a lightweight and flexible approach to data integration, while cons include less support for complex data transformation logic.
  5. Luigi: Luigi is a Python-based workflow management system that helps automate complex pipelines. Key features include task dependency management, workflow visualization, and task retry mechanisms. Pros include a simple and intuitive interface, while cons include a lack of built-in data transformation capabilities.
  6. Kedro: Kedro is a development workflow tool that helps you build data pipelines. Key features include data modeling, pipeline visualization, and project template. Pros include a focus on reproducibility and modularity, while cons include a more developer-centric tool compared to dbt.
  7. Dataform: Dataform is a SQL-based tool for data transformation and orchestration. Key features include data testing, scheduling, and collaborative workflows. Pros include seamless SQL integration and version control, while cons include a more limited range of data sources compared to dbt.
  8. dagster-millenium-falcon: This library provides a set of tools to create Airflow-native pipelines with the structure and confidence of dagster. Key features include integration with Airflow, dependency graph visualization, and reusable components. Pros include leveraging the strengths of both dagster and Airflow, while cons include potential compatibility issues as a newer tool.
  9. Cube.js: Cube.js is an open-source analytics layer that helps you create analytics APIs fast. Key features include pre-aggregated data, real-time analytics, and charting libraries integration. Pros include real-time data processing capabilities, while cons include a focus on analytics rather than ETL transformations.
  10. Pachyderm: Pachyderm is a data versioning tool that allows you to keep track of changes to your data pipeline. Key features include versioned data processing, containerized data pipelines, and data lineage tracking. Pros include a strong focus on data versioning and reproducibility, while cons include a more complex setup compared to dbt.

Top Alternatives to dbt

  • act
    act

    Rather than having to commit/push every time you want test out the changes you are making to your .github/workflows/ files (or for any changes to embedded GitHub actions), you can use this tool to run the actions locally. The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides. ...

  • Airflow
    Airflow

    Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed. ...

  • Looker
    Looker

    We've built a unique data modeling language, connections to today's fastest analytical databases, and a service that you can deploy on any infrastructure, and explore on any device. Plus, we'll help you every step of the way. ...

  • Apache Spark
    Apache Spark

    Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning. ...

  • Slick
    Slick

    It is a modern database query and access library for Scala. It allows you to work with stored data almost as if you were using Scala collections while at the same time giving you full control over when a database access happens and which data is transferred. ...

  • Spring Data
    Spring Data

    It makes it easy to use data access technologies, relational and non-relational databases, map-reduce frameworks, and cloud-based data services. This is an umbrella project which contains many subprojects that are specific to a given database. ...

  • DataGrip
    DataGrip

    A cross-platform IDE that is aimed at DBAs and developers working with SQL databases. ...

  • DBeaver
    DBeaver

    It is a free multi-platform database tool for developers, SQL programmers, database administrators and analysts. Supports all popular databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase, Teradata, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, etc. ...

dbt alternatives & related posts

act logo

act

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Run your GitHub Actions locally
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PROS OF ACT
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      Airflow logo

      Airflow

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      A platform to programmaticaly author, schedule and monitor data pipelines, by Airbnb
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      PROS OF AIRFLOW
      • 51
        Features
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        Task Dependency Management
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        Beautiful UI
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        Cluster of workers
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        Extensibility
      • 6
        Open source
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        Complex workflows
      • 5
        Python
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        Good api
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        Apache project
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        Custom operators
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        Dashboard
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      • 2
        Observability is not great when the DAGs exceed 250
      • 2
        Running it on kubernetes cluster relatively complex
      • 2
        Open source - provides minimum or no support
      • 1
        Logical separation of DAGs is not straight forward

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      Shared insights
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      AWS Step FunctionsAWS Step FunctionsAirflowAirflow

      I am working on a project that grabs a set of input data from AWS S3, pre-processes and divvies it up, spins up 10K batch containers to process the divvied data in parallel on AWS Batch, post-aggregates the data, and pushes it to S3.

      I already have software patterns from other projects for Airflow + Batch but have not dealt with the scaling factors of 10k parallel tasks. Airflow is nice since I can look at which tasks failed and retry a task after debugging. But dealing with that many tasks on one Airflow EC2 instance seems like a barrier. Another option would be to have one task that kicks off the 10k containers and monitors it from there.

      I have no experience with AWS Step Functions but have heard it's AWS's Airflow. There looks to be plenty of patterns online for Step Functions + Batch. Do Step Functions seem like a good path to check out for my use case? Do you get the same insights on failing jobs / ability to retry tasks as you do with Airflow?

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      Shared insights
      on
      JenkinsJenkinsAirflowAirflow

      I am looking for an open-source scheduler tool with cross-functional application dependencies. Some of the tasks I am looking to schedule are as follows:

      1. Trigger Matillion ETL loads
      2. Trigger Attunity Replication tasks that have downstream ETL loads
      3. Trigger Golden gate Replication Tasks
      4. Shell scripts, wrappers, file watchers
      5. Event-driven schedules

      I have used Airflow in the past, and I know we need to create DAGs for each pipeline. I am not familiar with Jenkins, but I know it works with configuration without much underlying code. I want to evaluate both and appreciate any advise

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      Looker logo

      Looker

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      Pioneering the next generation of BI, data discovery & data analytics
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      PROS OF LOOKER
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        Real time in app customer chat support
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        GitHub integration
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        Reduces the barrier of entry to utilizing data
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      Apache Spark logo

      Apache Spark

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      Fast and general engine for large-scale data processing
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      PROS OF APACHE SPARK
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        Open-source
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        Fast and Flexible
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        One platform for every big data problem
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        Great for distributed SQL like applications
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        Easy to install and to use
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        Works well for most Datascience usecases
      • 2
        Interactive Query
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        Machine learning libratimery, Streaming in real
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        In memory Computation
      CONS OF APACHE SPARK
      • 4
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      Eric Colson
      Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix · | 21 upvotes · 6.1M views

      The algorithms and data infrastructure at Stitch Fix is housed in #AWS. Data acquisition is split between events flowing through Kafka, and periodic snapshots of PostgreSQL DBs. We store data in an Amazon S3 based data warehouse. Apache Spark on Yarn is our tool of choice for data movement and #ETL. Because our storage layer (s3) is decoupled from our processing layer, we are able to scale our compute environment very elastically. We have several semi-permanent, autoscaling Yarn clusters running to serve our data processing needs. While the bulk of our compute infrastructure is dedicated to algorithmic processing, we also implemented Presto for adhoc queries and dashboards.

      Beyond data movement and ETL, most #ML centric jobs (e.g. model training and execution) run in a similarly elastic environment as containers running Python and R code on Amazon EC2 Container Service clusters. The execution of batch jobs on top of ECS is managed by Flotilla, a service we built in house and open sourced (see https://github.com/stitchfix/flotilla-os).

      At Stitch Fix, algorithmic integrations are pervasive across the business. We have dozens of data products actively integrated systems. That requires serving layer that is robust, agile, flexible, and allows for self-service. Models produced on Flotilla are packaged for deployment in production using Khan, another framework we've developed internally. Khan provides our data scientists the ability to quickly productionize those models they've developed with open source frameworks in Python 3 (e.g. PyTorch, sklearn), by automatically packaging them as Docker containers and deploying to Amazon ECS. This provides our data scientist a one-click method of getting from their algorithms to production. We then integrate those deployments into a service mesh, which allows us to A/B test various implementations in our product.

      For more info:

      #DataScience #DataStack #Data

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      Conor Myhrvold
      Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 7 upvotes · 2.9M views

      Why we built Marmaray, an open source generic data ingestion and dispersal framework and library for Apache Hadoop :

      Built and designed by our Hadoop Platform team, Marmaray is a plug-in-based framework built on top of the Hadoop ecosystem. Users can add support to ingest data from any source and disperse to any sink leveraging the use of Apache Spark . The name, Marmaray, comes from a tunnel in Turkey connecting Europe and Asia. Similarly, we envisioned Marmaray within Uber as a pipeline connecting data from any source to any sink depending on customer preference:

      https://eng.uber.com/marmaray-hadoop-ingestion-open-source/

      (Direct GitHub repo: https://github.com/uber/marmaray Kafka Kafka Manager )

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      Slick logo

      Slick

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      Database query and access library for Scala
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              DataGrip logo

              DataGrip

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              A database IDE for professional SQL developers
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                Quick-fixes using keyboard shortcuts
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                Database introspection on 21 different dbms
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                Export data using a variety of formats using open api
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                Import data
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                DBeaver logo

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                  Move data between databases
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                  Wide range of DBMS support
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                  SAP Hana DB support
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