Effortless Documentation with dbt: Streamlining Data Warehouse Documentation
Unlocking Clarity and Collaboration in Data Modeling
When was the last time you looked at a data warehouse for the first time? Do you remember that feeling of frustration, not knowing what tables orders_final_v1 contained? How about the difference between user_uuid and user_id? Any data practitioner can relate to such feelings.
Thankfully for us, dbt (Data Build Tool) has made documenting data warehouses a much easier task. All we need to do is include the documentation of our tables and columns in the schema YAML file. Then, all the information gets compiled into a neat HTML file.
Documenting your Data Warehouse (DWH)
When working with data models in dbt, it is important to document your work to ensure that others can understand what you have built and how to use it.
Let’s begin with the models/schema.yml file. This file will contain all the information about your tables. For example, consider the following documentation for the table dim_album:
