Anatomy of a dbt project

Some basic concepts and project structure to help you get started with a dbt project.

Photo by Barn Images on Unsplash

For analysts not from a technical background, working with dbt can be intimidating at first. Writing codes to configure everything takes some time to get used to, especially if you are used to setting everything up using a UI.

If you consider dbt for your team or just started with a team that uses dbt, this post will hopefully help ease you into the project structure and some basic concepts. We will walk through most files and folders in the image below. You can file the repo here.

Image from dbt-init project.

profiles.yml

This file contains the database connection that dbt will use to connect to the data warehouse. You only have to worry about this file if you set up dbt locally.

Since this file can have sensitive information such as project name and database credentials, it is not in your dbt project. By default, the file is created in the folder: ~/.dbt/.

If you start your project from scratch, running dbt init will generate this file for you. If not, you may have to create the .dbt…