dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, today announced several new product capabilities to its dbt Cloud platform at its annual customer conference, Coalesce 2023. New dbt Cloud capabilities enable customers to adopt dbt at scale and include dbt Explorer, Cloud CLI, new partner adapters, and the next generation of the dbt Semantic Layer. dbt Labs also announced the new dbt Mesh paradigm, which equips teams to collaborate across projects to support a data mesh architecture, enabled by the new capabilities. These announcements provide organizations with a centralized data transformation platform where everyone can contribute to data in a governed manner with increased velocity, quality, consistency, and coordination.
"We first introduced dbt Cloud to help data analysts and engineers productionize dbt deployments," said Tristan Handy, CEO and founder of dbt Labs. "With today's announcements, dbt Cloud customers can create a mesh of interconnected, domain-owned, dbt codebases. The developments we've made this year are central to enabling collaboration across multiple projects, a requirement for managing dbt at scale."
Centralized, Secure, and Scalable Governance with dbt Mesh
Historically, organizations have relied solely on a central data platform and data team to deliver analytics to the entire business, resulting in bottlenecks, overworked teams, shipping delays, and low data quality. Today, dbt Labs has launched dbt Mesh, a new paradigm that makes it possible for domain teams to build and maintain their own data products, without compromising on governance or creating silos. By doing so, data products can quickly and easily build on each other. Instead of centralizing business logic in a monolithic dbt project, central data teams can make platform decisions and set global standards for governance.
The dbt Mesh paradigm allows users to:
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Declare interfaces between contributors inside of dbt, with the use of model access levels, model contracts, and model versions.
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Natively support dependencies across projects, which allows each domain team to own their own data products.
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Democratize ownership by allowing every team to own and contribute to their own data products instead of requiring a single, monolithic dbt project for the entire organization.
Launched in public preview, the capabilities enabling dbt Mesh are currently available for no additional cost to current dbt Cloud customers.
Intuitively Navigate and Discover Data Products with dbt Explorer
dbt Labs also announced dbt Explorer, a next generation documentation and lineage visualization experience. In addition to supporting the dbt Mesh paradigm, dbt Explorer allows any organization to more easily discover and understand their dbt assets across teams and projects.
dbt Explorer makes it easier for data teams to share context, troubleshoot issues, and reuse assets across different parts of the organization – significantly reducing friction in the data development workflow, and allowing teams to better control their data platform spend at the same time.
Develop Anywhere with the Cloud CLI
The dbt Cloud platform has been enhanced to now provide data developers more flexibility in how they write dbt code. In addition to its in-browser Integrated Development Environment (IDE), dbt Cloud now offers a dedicated Command Line Interface (CLI), giving more advanced practitioners the flexibility to contribute via any terminal or IDE software of their choosing.
This gives data practitioners the best of both worlds: they can eliminate many of the hassles of local development—such as the complexities of manual configuration, authentication, and version upgrades—while enjoying the benefits of a hosted solution, all from the comfort of their preferred development environment.
With the introduction of the Cloud CLI, data teams can operate with confidence knowing that the entire organization is collaborating from a consistent platform, while each developer is free to work from wherever they are most comfortable.
Expanding the Ecosystem with Microsoft adapters
Additionally, dbt Labs is expanding the ecosystem of cloud data platforms that dbt Cloud inter-operates with, announcing upcoming adapters for Microsoft Azure Synapse and Microsoft Fabric. Existing Synapse and Fabric customers will soon be able to leverage dbt Cloud's full-service data transformation capabilities, providing mutual customers even more flexibility into how and where they develop and deliver data products. dbt Cloud support for Fabric is currently in private preview, and Synapse support will be made available before the end of 2023.
Power Consistent Metrics with the dbt Semantic Layer
dbt Labs also announced the next generation of the dbt Semantic Layer following its acquisition of Transform in February 2023. The dbt Semantic Layer now enables organizations to centrally define business metrics in dbt and then query them from a number of integrated analytics tools including Tableau, Google Sheets, Hex, and Mode. This allows organizations to ensure that critical definitions such as "revenue," "customer count," and "churn rate" are universally consistent, in every downstream application, by every user and team. The new dbt Semantic Layer is accessible to data platforms supported by dbt Cloud, namely BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, and Snowflake.
About dbt Labs
Since 2016, dbt Labs has been on a mission to help analysts create and disseminate organizational knowledge. dbt Labs pioneered the practice of analytics engineering, built the primary tool in the analytics engineering toolbox, and has been fortunate enough to see a fantastic community coalesce to help push the boundaries of the analytics engineering workflow. Today there are 30,000 companies using dbt every week, 90,000 dbt Community members, and 3,600 dbt Cloud customers.