Data is something that has become a necessary part of the modern digital landscape. In a lot of ways, businesses wouldn’t have the ability to continue growing and reach new customers and be successful without being able to use their data. The problem with data is that it’s incredibly easy for even smaller companies to ammas large amounts of data that need to be refined and integrated into their systems. The more data that is acquired, the more it takes to manage.
This is both a good thing and a challenge, because the more successful a business is, the more it will grow. In tandem with this, the more that a business grows the more data it is responsible for and the more important the management of that data becomes. While there are a lot of tools that can help data teams harness their company’s data and create success out of it, the challenge for smaller companies is capacity.
For a large company that can afford to have robust data teams of data scientists and engineers, the options for their data stack are a lot broader. For a smaller company that may have limited data team resources, creating a data stack that compliments its work is crucial. Thankfully, there are tools like dbt Cloud that are specifically designed to help small data teams leverage their time and talent for success.
In fact, dbt Cloud is a wonderful tool to integrate into your data stack that will not only help inter-app communication but will boost your data team’s productivity in general. If you have been curious about how dbt Cloud can help you and your data team achieves success, here is everything you need to know!
Table of Contents
What is dbt Cloud?
For small to mid-sized companies looking to improve or build their data stack, dbt Cloud should be a non-negotiable. This tool was designed specifically to help small data teams leverage their time and talent in meaningful ways so they can experience success. By providing powerful features, this data build tool can free up small teams to accomplish more with the time and resources they have.
This happens largely in part because dbt Cloud brings software engineering best practices to the world of data development. One of the many benefits of dbt Cloud is that it is a complementary tool which means that it can work with almost any data stack. Not only that but certain aspects of dbt Cloud are open-sourced such as its orchestration features. This means that as your team outgrows features like orchestration, you can integrate larger tools like Dagster, or Prefect. This makes dbt Cloud not only a great tool to use for a small data teams but a tool that has scalability and growth in mind.
Dedicated IDE
One of the features that dbt Cloud brings to your data stack, is the dedicated IDE or integrated development environment. This tool allows you to constantly be building out and testing your models as you run them. This IDE helps data teams write quickly and accurately, and it also improves the query system for your data warehouse.
Because dbt Cloud offers continuous integration and continuous deployment, when paired with proper orchestration, your data teams can confidently build models in a time-effective manner. This helps leverage the time of your data team that would otherwise be wrapped up in tedious testing and deployment. This version of continuous integration, or Slim CI, helps reduce build times while also providing your engineers with the data they need to have confidence in their models.
Orchestration
As stated before, orchestration is one of the most important tools that any data team can have. Being able to build out a workflow to test models and run complex tasks on a schedule is a necessity. Dbt Cloud allows for data teams to scale their needs when it comes to orchestration, by using other orchestration tools while still using dbt Cloud’s useful features. This unique lack of a lock-in helps small data teams scale naturally.
Conclusion
With a dedicated out-of-the-box documentation viewer, a dedicated IDE, slim CI, and the ability to scale orchestration, dbt Cloud offers a lot of powerful and unique features to data teams. One of the biggest things that dbt Cloud does, is it offers teams a lack of distraction so that they can focus their efforts efficiently.
Data is a complicated field to work in and one that takes a lot of skill and is not cheap. Finding the right tools to that leverage a data team’s skill and time for success is crucial. Dbt Cloud was designed with this goal in mind. With improved inter-app communication, the ability to work with almost any data stack, and a suite of useful features, dbt Cloud should be a serious consideration for your data team.
