dwl285

Are you using Dataform Graham? I don't think we've spoken if you are, I'd love to chat! dan at dataform.co

IMO the right solution to this is not spending a bunch of time upfront trying to design your warehouse. You just want to adopt a tool that makes it easy to continuously refactor into more optimal formats as your warehouse scales. Happy to discuss more if you're interested! dan at dataform.co

If you're interested in an alternative to dbt that's a little more analyst friendly, check out Dataform. A lot of teams are using Dataform between the warehouse and looker, to handle transformation logic using pure SQL, but in a more user friendly format than Airflow. Get in touch if you'd like to chat! dan at dataform.co

Good point. I guess I mean, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick one, this is what I'd pick (and I think it works for a pretty meaningful percentage of companies that are looking for an answer to the original question)

If you have a data team: Stitch / Segment -> BigQuery -> Dataform -> BigQuery -> Looker

I work with many companies helping them set up their data stack, and from what I've seen this is pretty much the optimal set up. These tools all require very little maintenance, are relatively cheap (compared to the man power required to set these things up from scratch internally), and scale well as companies grow and complexity increases.

If you don't have a data team: Segment -> Amplitude/Mixpanel

If you don't have a dedicated data team, you can do a lot with tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel. Get your engineering team set up with Segment and tracking all of the important interactions within your product, and set Segment to pass those events to Amp/Mix. Self serve analytics in these tools is then pretty easy and will serve you well until you start hiring a data team.

Full disclosure: I work for Dataform (used to be a customer, loved it so much I decided to join them)