Tools that facilitate data transformations
As data volumes, complexity, and usage continue to grow, tools that facilitate data transformations have emerged to simplify and streamline this process. During the early 2020s, dbt became one of the most prominent and used tools for data transformation.
These tools have revolutionized the way data engineers and analysts work, making it easier and more efficient to transform and analyze data. Previously, data transformations consisted of a series of files containing SQL queries, requiring extensive coding and scripting to ensure they ran in the desired order.
Now, most tools can transform data, sometimes with low or even no code. However, the fact that you can doesn’t mean that you should. Most of the time, the answer to whether you should transform data in a tool is “it depends.” The following section explores what to consider when making that decision.
Types of transformation tools
As seen in the Where to...
