Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Databricks VS dbt

Compare Databricks VS dbt and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Databricks logo Databricks

Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.‎What is Apache Spark?

dbt logo dbt

dbt is a data transformation tool that enables data analysts and engineers to transform, test and document data in the cloud data warehouse.
  • Databricks Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-14
  • dbt Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-16

Databricks features and specs

  • Unified Data Analytics Platform
    Databricks integrates various data processing and analytics tools, offering a unified environment for data engineering, machine learning, and business analytics. This integration can streamline workflows and reduce the complexity of data management.
  • Scalability
    Databricks leverages Apache Spark and other scalable technologies to handle large datasets and high computational workloads efficiently. This makes it suitable for enterprises with significant data processing needs.
  • Collaborative Environment
    The platform offers collaborative notebooks that allow data scientists, engineers, and analysts to work together in real-time. This enhances productivity and fosters better communication within teams.
  • Performance Optimization
    Databricks includes various performance optimization features such as caching, indexing, and query optimization, which can significantly speed up data processing tasks.
  • Support for Various Data Formats
    The platform supports a wide range of data formats and sources, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, making it versatile and adaptable to different use cases.
  • Integration with Cloud Providers
    Databricks is designed to work seamlessly with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, allowing users to easily integrate it into their existing cloud infrastructure.

Possible disadvantages of Databricks

  • Cost
    Databricks can be expensive, especially for large-scale deployments or high-frequency usage. It may not be the most cost-effective solution for smaller organizations or projects with limited budgets.
  • Complexity
    While powerful, Databricks can be complex to set up and manage, requiring specialized knowledge in Apache Spark and cloud infrastructure. This might lead to a steeper learning curve for new users.
  • Dependency on Cloud Providers
    Being heavily integrated with cloud providers, Databricks might face issues like vendor lock-in, where switching providers becomes difficult or costly.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    Databricks is primarily designed for cloud environments, which means offline or on-premise capabilities are limited, posing challenges for organizations with strict data governance policies.
  • Resource Management
    Efficiently managing and allocating resources can be challenging in Databricks, especially in large multi-user environments. Mismanagement of resources could lead to increased costs and reduced performance.

dbt features and specs

  • Modularity
    dbt promotes a modular approach to building analytics workflows, allowing data teams to break down transformations into smaller, more manageable SQL scripts. This improves code readability, maintainability, and collaboration among team members.
  • Version Control Integration
    By integrating with Git, dbt enables teams to version control their data transformation scripts, fostering collaboration, auditability, and change tracking over time.
  • CI/CD Pipeline Compatibility
    dbt supports integration with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems, allowing automated testing and deployment of transformations as part of the data pipeline.
  • Data Quality Testing
    dbt offers built-in testing functionalities, which enable developers to write tests to validate data transformations and ensure data quality/integrity within their data models.
  • Documentation and Lineage
    dbt automatically generates documentation for the data models and creates a lineage graph, providing transparency and understanding of data flows and dependencies.

Possible disadvantages of dbt

  • SQL Limitations
    Since dbt primarily relies on SQL for transformations, complex transformations may become cumbersome or difficult to implement compared to programming languages like Python or R.
  • Learning Curve
    New users may face a learning curve in setting up and effectively using dbt, especially if they are unfamiliar with concepts like data modeling, Git, or command-line tools.
  • Performance Constraints
    The performance of dbt transformations is dependent on the underlying data warehouse. Large-scale transformations could lead to performance inefficiencies if the warehouse is not optimized.
  • Cost
    Running dbt transformations continuously can incur costs associated with warehouse usage, especially if the data models involve processing large volumes of data regularly.
  • Dependency on Data Stack
    dbt's effectiveness is reliant on having a robust data warehouse and surrounding data stack, meaning smaller or less mature setups may struggle to leverage its full potential.

Databricks videos

Introduction to Databricks

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Azure Databricks Tutorial | Data transformations at scale
  • Review - Databricks - Data Movement and Query

dbt videos

Introduction to dbt (data build tool) from Fishtown Analytics

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Databricks and dbt)
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Data Integration
0 0%
100% 100
Big Data Analytics
100 100%
0% 0
Web Service Automation
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Databricks and dbt. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Databricks and dbt

Databricks Reviews

Jupyter Notebook & 10 Alternatives: Data Notebook Review [2023]
Databricks notebooks are a popular tool for developing code and presenting findings in data science and machine learning. Databricks Notebooks support real-time multilingual coauthoring, automatic versioning, and built-in data visualizations.
Source: lakefs.io
7 best Colab alternatives in 2023
Databricks is a platform built around Apache Spark, an open-source, distributed computing system. The Databricks Community Edition offers a collaborative workspace where users can create Jupyter notebooks. Although it doesn't offer free GPU resources, it's an excellent tool for distributed data processing and big data analytics.
Source: deepnote.com
Top 5 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Jan 11, 2023 The 5 best cloud data warehouse solutions in 2023Google BigQuerySource: https://cloud.google.com/bigqueryBest for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:SnowflakeBest for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:Amazon RedshiftSource: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/Best for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:FireboltSource: https://www.firebolt.io/Best for:Top...
Top 10 AWS ETL Tools and How to Choose the Best One | Visual Flow
Databricks is a simple, fast, and collaborative analytics platform based on Apache Spark with ETL capabilities. It accelerates innovation by bringing together data science and data science businesses. It is a fully managed open-source version of Apache Spark analytics with optimized connectors to storage platforms for the fastest data access.
Source: visual-flow.com
Top Big Data Tools For 2021
Now Azure Databricks achieves 50 times better performance thanks to a highly optimized version of Spark. Databricks also enables real-time co-authoring and automates versioning. Besides, it features runtimes optimized for machine learning that include many popular libraries, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, etc.

dbt Reviews

13 data integration tools: a comparative analysis of the top solutions
Reading about the previous integration tool, you probably noticed the support of dbt Core (Data Build Tools) for data transformations. In fact, dbt Core is a product of its own – an open-source command-line tool for data pipelines. In addition to the Core product, dbt also offers a Cloud platform that strives to bridge the gap between software developers and data management...
Source: blog.n8n.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Databricks should be more popular than dbt. It has been mentiond 18 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Databricks mentions (18)

  • Platform Engineering Abstraction: How to Scale IaC for Enterprise
    Vendors like Confluent, Snowflake, Databricks, and dbt are improving the developer experience with more automation and integrations, but they often operate independently. This fragmentation makes standardizing multi-directional integrations across identity and access management, data governance, security, and cost control even more challenging. Developing a standardized, secure, and scalable solution for... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • dolly-v2-12b
    Dolly-v2-12bis a 12 billion parameter causal language model created by Databricks that is derived from EleutherAI’s Pythia-12b and fine-tuned on a ~15K record instruction corpus generated by Databricks employees and released under a permissive license (CC-BY-SA). Source: about 2 years ago
  • Clickstream data analysis with Databricks and Redpanda
    Global organizations need a way to process the massive amounts of data they produce for real-time decision making. They often utilize event-streaming tools like Redpanda with stream-processing tools like Databricks for this purpose. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • DeWitt Clause, or Can You Benchmark %DATABASE% and Get Away With It
    Databricks, a data lakehouse company founded by the creators of Apache Spark, published a blog post claiming that it set a new data warehousing performance record in 100 TB TPC-DS benchmark. It was also mentioned that Databricks was 2.7x faster and 12x better in terms of price performance compared to Snowflake. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • A Quick Start to Databricks on AWS
    Go to Databricks and click the Try Databricks button. Fill in the form and Select AWS as your desired platform afterward. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
View more

dbt mentions (2)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Databricks and dbt, you can also consider the following products

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

Datacoves - Managed dbt-core, VS Code in the browser, and Managed Airflow.

Looker - Looker makes it easy for analysts to create and curate custom data experiences—so everyone in the business can explore the data that matters to them, in the context that makes it truly meaningful.

dataloader.io - Quickly and securely import, export and delete unlimited amounts of data for your enterprise.

Jupyter - Project Jupyter exists to develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages. Ready to get started? Try it in your browser Install the Notebook.

CData Sync - Straightforward data synchronizing between on-premise and cloud data sources with a wide range of traditional and emerging databases.