dbt

dbt turned SQL transformations into software engineering — version control, testing, documentation, and modular design for your data warehouse. Write SELECT statements, dbt handles the DAG, materializations, and incremental builds. It's the tool that created "analytics engineering" as a discipline.

If you're doing data transformation in any modern warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Postgres), dbt is the industry standard. SQLMesh is the open-source challenger with better environment isolation and incremental rebuilds — and it was recently acquired by Fivetran alongside dbt Labs, making the competitive landscape interesting. Dataform is Google's free alternative locked to BigQuery. Coalesce is the visual, no-code option.

The catch: dbt Cloud costs about $100 per user per month, and the open-source CLI requires you to handle orchestration yourself (Airflow, Dagster, or cron). The Fivetran acquisition raises questions about dbt's independence — tool neutrality matters more than ever. And dbt's YAML-heavy configuration and Jinja templating in SQL creates a learning curve that pure SQL analysts find frustrating.