proposal.md

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From Overgrown to Thriving

Scaling Your dbt Project Like a Gardener

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Nicholas Yager

they/them

Principal Analytics Engineer Hubspot

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Reclaiming an overgrown garden dbt project

1. Survey your project
2. Clear out the weeds and trash
3. Renewal pruning
4. Divide the perennials
5. Keep the weeds under control

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Survey Your Project

1. What are your core entities?
2. What are your exposures?
3. How are your data consumers using your models?
4. Are there any obvious architectural issues?
5. Are there any anti-patterns being used?

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Clear Out The Weeds and Trash

1. Remove deprecated or otherwise unused models
2. Consolidate duplicate models

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Renewal Pruning

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Divide the Perennials

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Groups and Access

groups:
  - name: go_to_market
    owner:
      email: gtm@garden.supplies

models:
  - name: deals
    group: go_to_market
    access: public

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Multi-Project Deployments

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Keep the weeds under control

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Surface Area	Tools
Coding Conventions	sqlfluff sqlfmt
Documentation & Testing	dbt-checkpoint dbt Core tests and contracts
Modeling	dbt_project_evaluator Whetstone
Data Quality	dbt_expectations dbt_utils Many more

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Audience Takeaways

• An understanding of what an overgrown dbt project looks like and how they can hamper efficiency.
• Learning skills and techniques that they can implement while taming their dbt deployment.
• A sense of confidence that they can scale their dbt deployment effectively!

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From Overgrown to Thriving

Scaling Your dbt Project Like a Gardener

Nicholas A. Yager yager@nicholasyager.com