Data Orchestration Cheat Sheets

Schedule, chain, and monitor data pipelines with the right orchestrator. These cheat sheets cover Airflow (most common) and dbt (transformation-focused). Each explains when to pick it and includes production-grade patterns.

Orchestrators covered

• Airflow Essentials - DAG authoring, operators, XCom, retries, SLAs, backfill
• dbt Commands - models, tests, macros, incremental, exposures, packages

Best-practice sheets

• Airflow Best Practices - idempotent tasks, retries, SLA design, secrets handling
• dbt Best Practices - model structure, testing strategy, CI, documentation

Which orchestrator should I pick?

• Airflow: mature, huge community, operator ecosystem - default for enterprise teams
• dbt: transformation-only, SQL-first - pair with Airflow for end-to-end pipelines

Related tools

Use the cron builder to define schedules and the dbt Cloud cost calculator to estimate subscription cost.

Related categories

Explore best-practices cheat sheets, SQL cheat sheets, and the full cheat sheet library.

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