We’re excited to announce that IBM® watsonx.data™ now supports a powerful suite of tools for the modern dataops stack: data-build-tool, Apache Airflow, and VSCode. With data build tool (dbt) compatibility for both Spark and Presto engines, automated orchestration through Apache Airflow, and an integrated development environment via VSCode, watsonx.data offers a new set of rich capabilities. These features empower teams to efficiently build, manage and orchestrate data pipelines.

The challenge of complex data pipelines

Organizations today face the challenge of building and managing complex data pipelines that rely on multiple engines and environments. Teams must constantly switch between various tools and languages, adding complexity and slowing progress.

Coordinating workflows across different systems can also be difficult, leading to inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Without a seamless orchestration tool, data delivery slows, delaying critical decision-making.

A unified approach

To address these challenges, organizations need a unified, streamlined solution that handles both data transformations and workflow orchestration. By adopting a single, standardized language for transformations and an automated tool for orchestration, teams can simplify their processes, making collaboration easier and reducing the complexity of maintaining pipelines. This is where dbt and Apache Airflow come in.

dbt enables teams to write modular structured query language (SQL) code for data transformations, eliminating the need to learn more complex languages such as PySpark or Scala. Because SQL is a language most data teams already know, dbt makes it simpler to build, maintain and update transformations over time.

Apache Airflow automates and schedules tasks across the entire pipeline, minimizing manual effort and reducing errors. Together, dbt and Airflow provide a powerful framework for managing complex data pipelines more simply and efficiently.

Bringing it all together with watsonx.data

Tools such as dbt and Apache Airflow are powerful but managing a growing data ecosystem requires more than individual tools. Watsonx.data enhances the strengths of these tools with the reliability, scalability and security of an enterprise-grade platform. By integrating dbt, Airflow and VSCode within watsonx.data, we’ve built a comprehensive solution that simplifies managing complex data pipelines:

• dbt simplifies data transformations using SQL, helping teams avoid the complexity of less familiar languages.
• Airflow automates orchestration, streamlining workflows and reducing bottlenecks.
• VSCode provides developers with a familiar environment, enhancing collaboration and productivity across teams.

This combination simplifies pipeline management, enabling teams to focus on what truly matters: driving real business outcomes. With these integrated tools, watsonx.data empowers teams to remain agile while streamlining data workflows. Want to learn more? Ready to transform your data pipelines?