Creating a Holistics Style Guide

I’m looking to create a Style Guide for Holistics, to compliment our SQL and dbt style guides. This will set out best practice / policies / schemas etc to follow when working with Holistics (AML in particular)

Has anybody already done anything similar they’d be willing to share as a starting point?

-or-

What are people’s recommendations for including?

eg, we follow a structure per project

  • Sources (1:1 with source tables - only basic changes / additional to these models)
  • Models (our main models folder, and must always reference a Source model or other existing Models - never directly reference a table)
  • Datasets

But I’d like to cover syntax, permissions / groups best practice etc

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Hi David, this is Ha from Holistics’s internal data team.

This question is interesting - we have not really looked into a Holistics Style Guide yet. Internally we also use dbt, and we have a dbt folder structure, model naming, field naming guide for Dimensions & Measures… Those things are often mirrored into our Holistics AML project.

How we are structuring our internal project:

.
|-- data_source
|   |-- datasets
|   |   |-- name_by_team_or_usage
|   |-- models
|   |   |-- name_by_source_applications
|   |   |-- name_by_usage
|   |   |-- ...

Notes:

  • data_source: Models and datasets from different data sources should be separated in different parent folders.
  • datasets folder contains .dataset.aml files. It can be grouped by their usage, or the teams that it mainly serves
  • models folder contains .model.aml files. It is best to mirror the dbt project structure here.

For Models & Datasets naming,

  • Naming: AML models can also follow the dbt model naming guide.
    • File names and model names can reuse the name defined in the dbt project.
    • use_lower_case_and_dash
  • Labeling: Since the label is what the end-user see, it should be descriptive and easy to understand
    • Avoid too much abbreviation
    • Remove prefixes and suffixes (like dim, facts…)
    • Use Upper Case And No Dash

There is also a field (Holistics Dimension & Measure) naming guide. If this is what you are looking for, we will try to publish a public version of it

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