Downstream use cases

Analytics engineers typically produce datasets for four key downstream use cases:

  • BI + Reporting: Often built by data analysts and used by business users.

  • Data science: Predictive machine learning models, built by data scientists and potentially deployed in collaboration with data engineers.

  • Operational analytics: Modeled data is propagated to frontline operations tools used by marketing, ops, sales and support teams (ex: Hubspot, Intercom, Salesforce).

  • Exploratory analysis: Used for collaboration amongst all flavors of data practitioner (analysts, engineers, scientists and business users) — often done in notebook applications or spreadsheets.

Since each of these use cases involves different team members, we’ll walk through the workflow summary (who / what / where / when) within each of them individually.

Last modified on:

dbt Learn on-demand

A free intro course to transforming data with dbt