Kira Furuichi

An overview of an interesting community slack thread about the relationship between data folks and backend developers

The COALESCE SQL function is an incredibly useful function that allows you to fill in unhelpful blank values that may show up in your data.

In this post, we’re going to give a deep-dive into the EXTRACT function, how it works, and why we use it. The EXTRACT function allows you to extract a specified date part from a date/time.

The LOWER SQL Function allows you to return a string value as an all lowercase string. It’s an effective way to create consistent capitalization for string values across your data.

The DATE_TRUNC function will truncate a date or time to the first instance for a given date part maintaining a date format. Wordy, wordy, wordy! What does this really mean?

The DATEDIFF function will return the difference in specified units (ex. days, weeks, years) between a start date/time and an end date/time. It’s a simple and widely used function that you’ll find yourself using more often than you expect.

One of the macros dbt utils offers is the `star` generator. This dbt macro is one of our favorites because it lets you select all the fields you want without writing the columns you don't.

Where have we been? Where are we going? What does the future hold for data engineers? How can dbt help you get there?