Introduction

The RA Data Warehouse is a framework for ingesting, combining and restructuring data from multiple source systems into a conformed, dimensional data warehouse. The framework is based around dbt ("Data Build Tool"), open-source toolkit for templating and orchestrating SQL-based data transformations of RAW API-sourced data into structures suitable for analysis, and pre-built transformations and design patterns taken from Rittman Analytics' previous data warehousing consulting experience.

dbt is a toolkit that solves the problem of testing, repeatability and modularity of analysts code by bringing the principles of modern software development to the analysts' workflow. The RA Development framework solves the problem of how to design your dbt transformations so that your project doesn't grind to a halt after you integrate your second, third, fourth data source because you need to combine identity across multiple systems, deduplicate multiple sources of customer data and make sure that numbers coming out of your BI tool still match with the numbers in your source systems.