Dbt Transformation Patterns

Production-ready patterns for dbt (data build tool) including model organization, testing strategies, documentation, and incremental processing.

When to Use This Skill

• Building data transformation pipelines with dbt
• Organizing models into staging, intermediate, and marts layers
• Implementing data quality tests
• Creating incremental models for large datasets
• Documenting data models and lineage
• Setting up dbt project structure

Core Concepts

1. Model Layers (Medallion Architecture)

sources/          Raw data definitions
    ↓
staging/          1:1 with source, light cleaning
    ↓
intermediate/     Business logic, joins, aggregations
    ↓
marts/            Final analytics tables

2. Naming Conventions