Showing the 5 aspects of engineering in Analytics Engineering as coined by dbt

The aim of this page📝 is to list 5 traits of analytics enginering practice taken from software engineering — and compare that to previous SQL practices.

The Pentagram of Engineering (just playing with BING)

• To me, this is on top of “iterative practices” that are the power of the machine, the scaling power.
• The fact that we’re unable to scale means we’re not using the iterative practice is not designed properly

A bit of dbt history going back to 2016

DBT — short for data built tool — the big fish coining the term analytics engineering

• 2016: DBT started at RJMetrics as a solution to add basic transformation capabilities to Stitch (acquired by Talend in 2018)
• 2018: The dbt Labs team (then called Fishtown Analytics) released a commercial product on top of dbt Core
• 2020: dbt Labs announced its Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz1. 2021: dbt Labs raised its Series C led by Altimeter, Sequoia, and Andreessen Horowitz
• 2022: The company raised $222 million for its Series D, at a $4.2 billion valuation1.