Supercharging dbt: 3 Ways Prefect Enhances Your Data Workflows

As organizations scale their data operations, orchestration becomes increasingly crucial for maintaining efficient and reliable workflows. In a talk during our dbt joint event, Taylor Curran and Sean Williams shared valuable insights on how Python-based orchestration can enhance dbt implementations.

What is Prefect?

Before diving into the synergies between Prefect and dbt, it's worth understanding what Prefect brings to the table. At its core, Prefect is a modern orchestration platform centered around Python. It allows teams to define complex data pipelines that interconnect various tools across their stack using straightforward Python syntax. The beauty lies in its simplicity: if you know basic Python, you're ready to use Prefect. By adding simple decorators to Python functions, you can transform regular code into production-ready workflows that Prefect will schedule, monitor, and manage.

1. Optimizing dbt Job Execution

One of the most significant advantages of using Prefect with dbt comes from moving beyond traditional cron-based scheduling. Consider this common scenario: you schedule data loading at 8 AM and dbt transformations at 9 AM. As your data volume grows, you might find yourself constantly adjusting these times to accommodate longer processing times. Prefect offers a more sophisticated approach through:

• Event-driven execution: Instead of rigid time-based scheduling, jobs can trigger based on actual events, such as files landing in S3
• Intelligent pipeline management: Upstream data loading jobs can automatically trigger dbt processes upon completion
• Enhanced resilience: Failed dbt freshness checks can automatically trigger data replication jobs

This approach is particularly valuable for teams dealing with varying data volumes or multiple data sources with different processing times. For instance, finance data taking 8.5 hours to load shouldn't hold up engineering teams' reporting processes.

2. Leveraging Python-Based AI Tooling

The second major advantage lies in Prefect's ability to seamlessly integrate dbt workflows with Python-based tools, including those that power generative AI. As generative AI increasingly relies on Python SDKs, Prefect enables organizations to fully harness the potential of their unstructured data.

Prefect's own use case provides an excellent example. With a Slack community of 30,000 data engineers, we needed to analyze technical questions and product feedback effectively. Our solution combines:

• Extraction of messages from S3
• Generating embeddings from unstructured data using OpenAI's SDK
• Storing structured outputs in Snowflake
• Transforming and aggregating this data using dbt

The integration is remarkably straightforward, requiring only simple task decorators in Python to create a robust pipeline that connects AI-powered text analysis with dbt transformations.

3. Enhancing Post-dbt Workflows

While dbt excels at transformations within the data warehouse, real business value often comes from what happens after these transformations. Prefect shines in orchestrating these downstream processes by:

• Responding to dbt cloud completion events through webhooks
• Enabling sophisticated event-driven workflows
• Supporting advanced data products and personalization

A practical example shared during the talk demonstrated how to create personalized user communications based on warehouse data. Using dbt-transformed data about user preferences and behaviors, a Python-based workflow could generate targeted messages about relevant features or updates.

Putting It All Together

The power of combining Prefect with dbt lies in creating a cohesive data pipeline that handles:

1. Initial data ingestion from various sources
2. AI-powered processing of unstructured data
3. dbt transformations and aggregations
4. Downstream data products and automations

This integration provides visibility across the entire data pipeline while maintaining the flexibility to respond to changing conditions automatically. Whether it's data freshness issues or unexpected processing delays, the system can adapt and respond appropriately.

The combination of Prefect and dbt represents a powerful approach to modern data orchestration. By leveraging Prefect's Python-based workflows alongside dbt's transformation capabilities, organizations can build more resilient, efficient, and sophisticated data pipelines. The ability to seamlessly integrate AI tools, respond to events in real-time, and maintain visibility across the entire data lifecycle makes this partnership particularly valuable in today's data-driven landscape.