dbt-buenavista 1.3.0

The buenavista adapter plugin for dbt (data build tool)

dbt-buenavista

Buena Vista is a Postgres proxy server written in Python. It is intended to serve as the Controller in the Model-View-Controller architecture for data applications, providing a locus of control for data teams in between the data warehouse (model layer) and downstream data consumers like BI tools and notebooks (view layer.)

dbt is the best way to manage a collection of data transformations written in SQL or Python for analytics and data science.

The purpose of dbt-buenavista is to explore some new techniques for creating dbt models that a proxy service like Buena Vista makes possible, starting with a way of executing dbt's Python models inspired by the approach taken by dbt-duckdb: instead of pushing the Python compute into the Python execution engines supported by Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery, the dbt-buenavista adapter executes the Python models on the Buena Vista server itself, reading in any data tables that are used in the computation as data frames (either Pandas or another data frame library supported by the data warehouse) and writing the data frame back to the data warehouse when the computation is finished. This approach makes it possible to support Python-based models against data warehouses that do not ship with a Python execution engine (most notably Postgres and Redshift) and may well simplify the development and debugging workflows for teams that want to include Python models in their data pipelines (e.g., print and logging statements will run on the Buena Vista server and can be sent wherever they need to go to aid in debugging.)

Installation

Configuring Your Profile

The profile settings for a dbt-buenavista connection are nearly identical to the settings for a dbt-postgres profile, since every dbt-buenavista adapter is a subclass of the dbt-postgres adapter. Instead of setting the profile's type field as postgres, you set it to one of the Buena Vista supported types, which are currently bv_duckdb (for a Buena Vista server powered by DuckDB) or bv_postgres (for a Buena Vista server that is proxying a Postgres database.) The host and port settings are required and should be configured to point at the Buena Vista server that you are using.

default:
  outputs:
   dev:
     type: <bv_duckdb|bv_postgres>
     host: <host>
     port: <port>
     dbname: <dbname>
     ...
  target: dev