from Hacker News

Dbt to acquire Transform to build out its semantic layer

by pinkbeanz on 2/9/23, 2:18 PM with 23 comments

• by rwhaling on 2/9/23, 7:40 PM

  Airbnb wrote a few great blog posts about why they built a standardized metrics layer - I think this one gives better technical context on the "what" and "why" than this announcement does:

  https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/how-airbnb-achieved-me...

  (As the article notes, Transform's founders are Airbnb vets who worked on Minerva)

• by wantsanagent on 2/9/23, 9:40 PM

  The interesting bit for me about Minerva (predecessor to Transform) was the engineering rigor that the pipeline allowed. It's pretty easy to write a query that brings a DB to its knees and the source controlled and reviewed intermediary steps for producing metrics seemed like crucial features. If you then have a good catalog of what metrics exist you can let BI tools or business types with their own tools mix and match performant metrics to their hearts delight.

• by pinkbeanz on 2/9/23, 2:18 PM

  After 2 years of slow progress, dbt acquires Transform and their open-source MetricFlow to help build out the semantic layer.

• by Wonnk13 on 2/9/23, 3:58 PM

  Seems like a cool place to work, but I'm always a little weary of venture backed open source companies. When the board wants a liquidity event they'll win over users every time- put more features behind a paywall or force everyone onto a SaaS platform.

  Anyhoo, all pure speculation. While I've never used it, my friends have great things to say about DBT.

• by di456 on 2/9/23, 6:44 PM

  How does this compare to multidimensional OLAP cubes? Do they solve similar problems of different time windowed views of the data?

• by tootie on 2/9/23, 4:56 PM

  Can someone ELI5 why to use DBT instead of CREATE VIEW?