Likelihood to Recommend The prerequisite is that you have a supported database/data warehouse and have already found a way to ingest your raw data. Then dbt is very well suited to manage your transformation logic if the people using it are familiar with SQL. If you want to benefit from bringing engineering practices to data, dbt is a great fit. It can bring CI/CD practices, version control, automated testing, documentation generation, etc. It is not so well suited if the people managing the transformation logic do not like to code (in SQL) but prefer graphical user interfaces.
Read full review It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.
Read full review Pros dbt supports version control through GIT, this allows teams to collaborate and track the data transformation logic. dbt allows us to build data models which helps to break complex transformation logic into simple and smaller logic. dbt is completely based on SQL which allows data analyst and data engineers to build the transformation logic. dbt can be easily integrated with snowflake. Read full review Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use. The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software. Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported. Read full review Cons Field-level lineage (currently at table level) Documentation inheritance - if a field is documented the downstream field of the same name could inherit the doc info Adding python model support (in beta now) Read full review Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive. Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link. Read full review Likelihood to Renew VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.
Read full review Usability It requires proficiency with SQL coding and with git practices, but with these prerequisites, it is easy to use. Especially with the dbt cloud, you get a nice interface that makes all the administrative tasks like scheduling jobs quite easy. I also like the built-in SQL editor with syntax highlighting and auto-completion.
Read full review The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.
Read full review Support Rating Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I actually don't know what the alternative to dbt is. I'm sure one must exist other than more 'roll your own' options like Apache Airflow, say, bu tin terms of super easy managed/cloud data transforms, dbt really does seem to be THE tool to use. It's $50/month per dev, BUT there's a FREE version for 1 dev seat with no read-only access for anyone else, so you can always start with that and then buy yourself a seat later.
Read full review I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
Read full review Return on Investment Simplified our BI layer for faster load times Increased the quality of data reaching our end users Makes complex transformations manageable Read full review We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides. We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android. Read full review ScreenShots