What is dbt (Data Build Tool)? How It Works and Where It Stops

This post details the role and boundaries of dbt (Data Build Tool) within the data stack, focusing on its capabilities in SQL-based data transformations, testing, and documentation. It explains how dbt fits between data ingestion and consumption tools, highlighting its limitations in orchestration, infrastructure management, and reverse ETL. The post also discusses the emergence of the 'analytics engineer' role, the dbt ecosystem, and the trade-offs between dbt Core and dbt Cloud. It introduces the dbt Semantic Layer as a solution for metric consistency and discusses where dbt's job ends, leading to potential issues like metric drift and bypassing governed tables.