Gen AI Data Guy

One of the things I like about this course are the instructors are really clear but also that it provides free labs that allow you to actually sign into AWS and perform some actions to actually create and do things without worrying that you are going to incur a cost.  Today I complete one of the hands on labs.  This was to create a lambda function, in this case it was a very basic python script that was searching a website for a keyword. I then placed this into a schedule and used cloudwatch to create a dashboard that monitored the running of this function. Overall it was a very simple use case but it was also a very simple process to setup.  I don't have much to add to this other than it is well worth signing up to cloud academy for the free training if nothing else, I am tempted, once i have done some more training, to give the paid for option a go to get the full sandboxes. 

The more I used dbt the more I like it. I am finding many of its features really useful and I haven't even done the training on macros and packages yet so I feel there is more to come yet. In the meantime I have now start to, just of the fun of it, create some downstream views with dependencies on other steps and a function in SQL. Happy to say it is all working really well and using jinja (and my Snowflake function ) has saved me heap of time coding.  Sources yml:  View using the source function (results in SQL) View that references the output from previous steps, allows them to be linked:  Assuming you create your sources in the yml file and reference previous steps using the reference function rather than calling the resulting table (dbt handles that for you) (as shown above) it will automatically work out the dependencies, run things in the right order and produces a lovely lineage graph like so.  I am hoping to stop playing with what I know of dbt and might make...

 So I enjoyed the first dbt training enough to give the next bunch of training a go. The first part of this training introduces you to jinja and using it to, for example, loop through creating case statements to pivot out rows to columns.  Jinja Code -  I can see there are lots of really useful purposes for this and am hoping that in I will find out later that rather than using a hard coded list you can use a query to generate the list of entries to loop through. This would be a great feature, one of the limitations of a lot of SQL systems is you can't pivot on an unknown list of values. Now onto learning about macros and packages in dbt.  Generates SQL Code -  

One of the tools I am hoping to get to grips with is DBT. It appears to be a very popular tool at the moment. I think with the trend of moving to ELT having a good tool to perform your transformations is important and from what I hear DBT is good.  I have signed up for the free DBT cloud developer account and connected it to my Snowflake instance but after that I am not quite sure what I am meant to be doing. DBT has its own training so I am starting with the dbt fundamentals course. The training is supposed to take several hours with a few more hours implementing the hands on project and gives up a badge for LinkedIn or something. I am more interested in trying out the tool and seeing what it can do, for free, for this project. I have looked into quite a few training courses over the last few months, looking at all the tools I am using for this and things like AWS and when it comes to actually being useful the dbt training is at the top so far. I skipped some as it was basic for s...