Altair Monarch vs. dbt

* Individual seat licenses are very expensive, which is one reason we are moving to CMOD/RMS. But RMS has less functionality than standalone Monarch (now known as "Modeler"). I would like to know what improvements we can expect in RMS, I would also ask, what is the future of the standalone version? * In the past there has been a dearth of user discussion and support in the online community, although this seems to be improving with the new "Datawatch Commmunity" (http://community.datawatch.com).

Incentivized

dbt (Data Build Tool) is best suited for doing the data transformation. dbt is just a transformation tool and it is not suitable for building a data pipeline which requires extraction of data and loading. dbt is well suited for SQL based transformation logic and it is less appropriate when transformation logic requires python.

Incentivized

• It allows us to quickly dump large non-ALV SAP reports into Excel. Exporting these reports prior to Modeler was cumbersome at best.
• Customizable models allow us to easily gather required data from the same report running different dates. This is perfect for month-end reports.
• Quick exports.

Incentivized

• user experience makes it easy to work with SQL and version control
• customer success team and the dbt (data build tool) community help establish best practices
• thorough and clear documentation

• Setting up visualizations with time series data requires a good understanding of how the software works. I would like it to be more intuitive. Having said that, time series data is inherently complicated and I don't see any obvious ways to make it simpler. But I'm not a software designer myself; they could put more resources into the user experience.
• Their video training is really helpful and they have a big library of videos, but the videos get out of date as they come out with new versions. I can imagine that it's difficult to keep all the videos updated, but it would be great if the videos were always using the latest major version of the product.
• They need more visualizations. They have a pretty big collection now but it seems like there is often some other way to present and visually analyze data that would be a better/tighter fit with requirements than the visualizations available in the standard product. I understand it is possible to add more visualizations - custom visualizations - but that's beyond my expertise.

Incentivized

• Slow load times of the dbt cloud environment (they're working on it via a new UI though)
• More out-of-the-box solutions for managing procedures, functions, etc would be nice to have, but honestly, it's pretty easy to figure out how to adapt dbt macros

Incentivized

Datawatch recently repositioned Data Pump and essentially priced us out of the market. The initial investment was very inexpensive, but the yearly maintenance contract was viewed as being a little pricey. The only value of the contract was that it included software upgrades. The Professional Services portion of the contract that was meant to provide support was not viewed as being very effective or beneficial.

Incentivized

dbt is very easy to use. Basically if you can write SQL, you will be able to use dbt to get what you need done. Of course more advanced users with more technical skills can do more things.

Incentivized

Datawatch is very good value of money compared to QlikView; QlikView is really more of a BI tool and has a lot of functions that I didn't need. Datawatch is very strong in the real-time area where Tableau, Panorama, and Qlik don't do very well. If you need to set up a visual monitoring dashboard, Datawatch is the best product I've seen for that. if you want to do a lot of in depth statistical analysis of large databases, Tableau is probably a good option.

Incentivized

Matillion is graphical versus dbt, which is SQL code-based (that, of course, is a matter of personal preference and not an objective advantage). The integrated testing, documentation generation, lineage, etc., were additional criteria that led us to choose dbt.

Incentivized

• Data Pump reduces complexity of report solutions by offering a standardized approach for organizing and scheduling
• 97% service level for past 5 years for all of our jobs going through Data Pump

Incentivized

• In 3 months we re-wrote the data warehouse (15-20 sources) in dbt with 3 developers.
• We are using it continually for the past year with no issues.
• Sorry, I don't have ROI numbers but the impact was huge.

Incentivized