dbt News

Sean McIntyre, Senior Solutions Architect at dbt Labs, demonstrated how to refactor long scripts for modularity.

Brian Gillet 18 May 2022

The dbt Live: Expert Series is a new 60-minute interactive experience where dbt Labs Solution Architects share practical advice on how to tackle the sticky problems we see come up over and over again in the field—like how to safely split environments with CI/CD, or how to implement blue/green deployments.

Julia Schottenstein 27 Apr 2022

… just not a good one to keep! In this two part series you’ll learn how we rearchitected our scheduler to meet greater demand in dbt Cloud. For those looking for more technical detail, check out the second post, in which an engineer on this team breaks down the architecture we started with, the technical...

Nikhil Kothari 14 Apr 2022

Experiencing dbt’s workflow on the lakehouse has never been easier.

Tristan Handy 24 Feb 2022

dbt Labs raised another round of funding– $222m at $4.2b valuation. Existing investor Altimeter led the round, with participation from Databricks, GV, Salesforce Ventures, and Snowflake. The raise will fuel our investment in building the next layer in the modern data stack.

Connor McArthur 23 Feb 2022

Ongoing incidents with dbt Cloud have created slowness and lack of availability. Here is a recap of what happened and our plans to fix this.

Drew Banin 3 Feb 2022

As of January 1, 2022 I officially stepped down from my role as Chief Product Officer at dbt Labs. We've brought on Margaret Francis as our new CPO. I'm incredibly excited to be transitioning into an individual contributor role.

Lauren Craigie 21 Dec 2021

Four modules designed to help the established analytics engineer plan for rapid growth.

Lauren Craigie 21 Dec 2021

Four modules of curated Coalesce content for teams just beginning their analytics engineering journey.

Randy Hanooman 16 Dec 2021

Covering both dbt Labs and dbt Cloud, these certifications represent a long-standing commitment to information security and privacy.

Tristan Handy 10 Dec 2021

The metrics layer generated a lot of buzz at Coalesce, prompting some exciting and important conversations. In short: the dbt Server that will make metrics accessible will be source available. This will provide users control, while enabling us to build a sustainable business.

Sai Maddali 9 Dec 2021

Last year we placed a big bet on foundational work — stability, reliability, and speed. 12 months, and a 600% increase in enterprise business later, we're focused on establishing dbt as the default standard for all enterprise data teams.

Jeremy Cohen 8 Dec 2021

dbt Core v1.0.0 has arrived. This major milestone enables users with production-grade workflows to safely and reliably build on top of dbt Core for years to come. Take a look at how we got here, and what's next for dbt.

Alexis Wong Baird 7 Dec 2021

dbt Labs now offers five free courses for the emerging analytics engineer. Those new to dbt will find everything they need to get started (and badged!) in our dbt Learn Fundamentals course, while seasoned users can go deeper on topics like macros, materializations, and project refactoring.

Fatima Conteh 8 Nov 2021

Dec 6-10, 2021: Coalesce is back with 85 speakers, 65+ sessions, and a little razzle-dazzle. Targeting 4 time zones (EST, PST, GMT, and AEDT)—there are plenty of opportunities to join us live. Find out what’s new, what’s staying the same, and how to prepare.

Nikhil Kothari 1 Nov 2021

Exciting developments in our partnership with Snowflake.

Julia Schottenstein 26 Oct 2021

Your code doesn't have to do the same thing everywhere it runs. Separate code from configuration - and set config based on context.

Christine Berger 13 Oct 2021

Where to begin when migrating legacy SQL transformation code to dbt? In a new (free!) on-demand course, analytics engineers from dbt Labs unpack the refactoring process they've employed across dozens of projects.

Julia Schottenstein 30 Sep 2021

Choosing between continuous delivery and continuous deployment based on business needs

Jeremy Cohen 23 Sep 2021

It's finally (almost) here. The best way to get ready is by upgrading *now* to the latest & greatest that dbt Core has to offer

Rosie Sampaio Cardoso 25 Aug 2021

We are cancelling in-person events for the remainder of 2021. We know these are disappointing news but remain confident that it's the right decision for safely engaging with the dbt Community.

Tristan Handy 19 Aug 2021

With the DAG-in-the-IDE (now available to all dbt Cloud users), analytics engineers can seamlessly navigate the core structure of their dbt project with low friction and low cognitive load, making the entire development process more intuitive, pleasant, and efficient.

Anna Filippova 30 Jul 2021

The data world needs more purple people — generalists who can navigate both the business context and the modern data stack. Let's put aside skillset dichotomies, and learn to feel comfortable in the space between.

Azzam Aijazi 28 Jul 2021

Give your business teams access to transformed data in the tools they use every day. Hightouch now integrates with dbt to help you bring “Reverse ETL” to your stack.

Meghan Colón 16 Jul 2021

Over the past few months, the dbt Labs’ recruiting team has partnered with leaders from our Engineering and Analytics Engineering organizations to design the Foundry Program. This program will provide a gateway for those that are new to the field or looking to make a career change.

Tristan Handy 30 Jun 2021

Fishtown Analytics– now dbt Labs– was founded to bring analytics engineering to everyone. $150m in new funding will fuel the next phase of that journey.

Amy Chen 2 Jun 2021

Our friends at Materialize, the world’s first SQL-platform for processing streaming data, have officially launched a new dbt adapter, now available in open beta. Together, we’re opening the door for analysts to become first-class creators and users of streaming analytics.

Amy Deora 4 May 2021

This SQL-first integration with Databricks means that analysts can build fully automated data pipelines in the same space that data engineers & data scientists work in their preferred frameworks.

Simon Ouderkirk 14 Jan 2021

Staging is a ✨new✨ quarterly event that brings dbt users (that’s you!) into the product development lifecycle (where I spend my days 😅).

Tristan Handy 1 Dec 2020

My thoughts on where our space has been and where it might be going.

Jeremy Cohen 12 Nov 2020

Spark for analytics, for real: now in dbt Cloud

Tristan Handy 11 Nov 2020

Fishtown Analytics has raised $29.5m in a Series B financing. New investor Sequoia Capital led the round with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Amplify Partners participating. Matt Miller of Sequoia joined our board.

Emilie Schario 29 Oct 2020

Translating business logic into code is technical knowledge. Building a marketing attribution model, forecasting, or calculating MRR is technical knowledge. Understanding the inner workings of the business is technical knowledge. So...is there such a thing as a non-technical data analyst?

Mila Page 21 Oct 2020

Our thoughts on what makes a great conference pitch and lessons for future iterations of Coalesce.

Tristan Handy 15 Oct 2020

I originally wrote this as a part of our new analyst onboarding program back in June of 2017, shared with new analysts on their first day. It’s as true today as it was the day I wrote it, so I wanted to publish it more broadly. Maybe you’ll find it useful!

Tristan Handy 14 Oct 2020

Many folks may not know it, but George (Fivetran’s Co-Founder and CEO) and I go way back. We started out as mortal enemies when I was helping to launch Stitch while Fivetran was in its still-nascent days back in 2015 😄 Since I founded Fishtown Analytics in 2016, though, we’ve been close partners and have...

Tristan Handy 1 Oct 2020

Fishtown Analytics started as a consulting company that competed with other dbt service providers. We are now a venture backed software company and our business model has fundamentally changed. Our relationship with dbt service providers is now 100% partnership.

Tristan Handy 22 Sep 2020

Two amazing companies in the modern data stack–Fivetran and Census–have launched major integrations with dbt. Here's why I'm excited about this.

Andrea Fabry 17 Sep 2020

A startup's guide to modeling data following Kimball best practices

Tristan Handy 12 Aug 2020

A recent post, Dashboards are Dead, sparked a conversation about the future of data reporting.

Claire Carroll 17 Jul 2020

We’re taking some steps to bring back the ✨magic ✨ in the dbt community. First stop — focusing the different ways the dbt community interacts with each other.

Tristan Handy 2 Jul 2020

dbt is no longer a niche product and dbt Slack is no longer a community of misfits...we’ve gone mainstream, folks.

Danielle Leong 25 Jun 2020

This article is written for job seekers. I’ve gathered a lot of data over the course of a month-long search and learned about what the landscape looks like for the analytics engineer hiring pipeline.

Andrea Fabry 18 Jun 2020

A holistic data testing framework to help you catch data quality issues before they impact your stakeholders.

Tristan Handy 22 Apr 2020

A Letter to the Community

Claire Carroll 7 Apr 2020

For the foreseeable future, all in-person dbt events are cancelled. But we have some good stuff in the works.

Drew Banin 17 Mar 2020

dbt is four years old, and we are so grateful for the community that has grown alongside this project.

Claire Carroll 16 Mar 2020

Marketing attribution has long been one of the stickiest problems in analytics. But with raw data, SQL, and dbt a previously complex problem can become beautifully simple.

Tristan Handy 31 Jan 2020

The first global conference for analytics engineers

Claire Carroll 17 Jan 2020

If you’re a data analyst at a SaaS company or an ecommerce business with a subscription component, it is inevitable that you will be asked to analyze metrics like churn, upgrades, and downgrades. Here's how to do this with dbt.

Tristan Handy 14 Jan 2020

The inability to bridge the chasm between IT and the business is the core dysfunction in modern data teams, and it’s also the biggest opportunity for progress.

Drew Banin 14 Jan 2020

With the dbt Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) you can orchestrate the entire analytics engineering workflow in your browser.

Erin Vaughan | Janessa Lantz 7 Jan 2020

Analytics code is code. Which means that it will have bugs. And without rigorous processes in place to find and eliminate those bugs, code quality will degrade over time.

Janessa Lantz 8 Oct 2019

Meet Sagar Velagala, Operations Manager at Lola.com. He's a one-person analytics team at a fast-growing, ~100 person company. Here's the analytics strategy that underpins his success.

Claire Carroll 3 Oct 2019

My love for group by 1, 2 developed when I was a fledgling analyst and has only grown. Even if you disagree, I hope this rant will inspire you to be more opinionated in your SQL style.

Tristan Handy 24 Sep 2019

If your time is valuable, it should be important to you to operate with the highest possible leverage. This allows you to get more done with your fixed number of hours. Simple. Here's how analysts can operate with leverage.

Tristan Handy 17 Sep 2019

Data teams are successful when they build reserves of trust. One important way to build trust is by consistently delivering projects on time. Here are four questions we've found to be useful in helping us spot the potholes that derail analytics engineering projects.

Claire Carroll 10 Sep 2019

All data analysts have faced the problem–how do I model data when the record in the data warehouse keeps changing? In this post, I'll cover how to solve this using dbt snapshots.

Erin Vaughan 5 Sep 2019

Version control is a critical part of the software engineering workflow, but for many analysts, writing and reviewing pull requests is still a relatively new habit. Here's a checklist we use to review analytics PRs.

Erin Vaughan 13 Aug 2019

Modern data warehouses have upended the way that data teams function. Increasingly, companies are hiring a new kind of technical analyst to bridge the gap between data engineers and data analysts. Here's why and how you can hire one too.

Erin Vaughan 6 Aug 2019

Advice from analysts and data engineers at HubSpot, Managed by Q, GitLab, Wong Decision Intelligence, AskWonder, and Calogica

Claire Carroll 22 Jul 2019

Stephen Whitworth, Data Engineering Lead at Monzo, spoke at the London dbt Meetup a few weeks ago. Here are my thoughts on his talk and what the dbt community can learn from it.

Claire Carroll 15 Jul 2019

The natural state of the universe is chaos: entropy tends to increase in closed systems, and there’s really nothing that we can do about that. So too is the nature of data warehouses: unless action is taken to maintain order.

Drew Banin 10 Jul 2019

dbt v0.14.0 lays the foundation for dbt Develop -- a query editor which leverages the brand new dbt server.

Tristan Handy 2 Jul 2019

680 companies use dbt every week, 2100 members of dbt Slack, dbt Cloud processed 140k jobs from 200 accounts in June, and we're hosting regular dbt Meetups in 3 cities (NY, SF, London). What a year!

Tristan Handy 10 Jun 2019

Holy crap! Within the past week we’ve seen the acquisitions of the two biggest players in the modern BI landscape, Looker and Tableau.

Tristan Handy 14 May 2019

Unnesting arrays on Redshift is a pain, but it’s doable. This post walks through the entire process, start to finish.

Tristan Handy 4 May 2019

Thoughts on pricing strategy and what it communicates about your company's vision for the future of the market you're in.

Erica Louie 9 Apr 2019

We just finished hosting the first dbt Learn. Here's why we did it, what we learned, and how you can get on board for the next one.

Jeremy Cohen 22 Mar 2019

We've set up Snowflake accounts for quite a few clients and have an approach that we rather like.

Claire Carroll 11 Mar 2019

As dbt is adopted by a wider community, we want to be extremely clear about when dbt is, and is not, a fit for your project. This guide will help you figure out if dbt is right for your data transformations.

Drew Banin 16 Jan 2019

The Fishtown Analytics team is incredibly excited to announce that we’ve re-launched Sinter as dbt Cloud!

Tristan Handy 16 Jan 2019

Sinter just became dbt Cloud. Why the re-brand?

Drew Banin 8 Jan 2019

In dbt’s latest release, we made some significant changes to how dbt processes these DAGs, and we’re seeing that these changes make dbt projects run about 30% faster.

Tristan Handy 6 Sep 2018

The hardest thing about scaling a company is communication. Here's how our latest release will make data communication just a little bit easier.

Drew Banin 6 Sep 2018

The newest release of dbt, v0.11, ships with a built-in data documentation website for your dbt project.

Drew Banin 3 Aug 2018

dbt 0.10.2 introduces data model aliasing to help you maintain a more organized data warehouse design.

Connor McArthur 31 Jul 2018

Sinter is the best way to deploy dbt in production at most organizations. It features rich scheduling functionality, accessible run logs and error alerting, and customizable job definitions. Today, it just got better.

Tristan Handy 6 Jul 2018

This week marks the second anniversary of Fishtown Analytics. Here's what we learned.

Tristan Handy 13 Jun 2018

I just went through the process of converting 25,000 lines of SQL from Redshift to Snowflake. Here are my notes.

Jason Ganz 8 Apr 2018

If you’re a hotshot junior analyst and you want a guide for breaking through this skills plateau, this guide is for you.

Tristan Handy 16 Mar 2018

This is a very stupid problem. I am not writing this post because it’s a fascinating topic—rather, I’m writing it in the hopes that you avoid the headaches I've gone through.

Drew Banin 9 Mar 2018

Today, March 9th, 2018, dbt turned two years old. Wow. Here's where we've been and where we're heading.

Tristan Handy 29 Jan 2018

I got this question on my last post. It is a good one, and one that I’ve gotten a bunch of times over the past year and a half. This post is my attempt to answer it.

Tristan Handy 16 Jan 2018

dbt and Looker were built with the same ethos: analysts should be working in code.

Drew Banin 9 Jan 2018

dbt version 0.9.1 adds support for late binding views in Redshift. This post will explain late binding views and explore some potential uses

Tristan Handy 2 Jan 2018

Frequently asked questions about Looker explores and how to design them very well.

Tristan Handy 11 Dec 2017

Modular analytics tools allow companies to choose components to fit their needs and switch out or augment components as their needs change. Here's what I think is missing from the market.

Erin Vaughan 30 Oct 2017

Want to go from syncing new data to having transformed data models built in minutes? Packages are going to be your friend.

Drew Banin 26 Oct 2017

We’re thrilled to announce the release of dbt version 0.9.0, including support for pivoting out columns and ignoring incongruent tables.

Tristan Handy 17 Oct 2017

dbt (data build tool) enables data analysts and engineers to transform data in their warehouses.

Tristan Handy 11 Sep 2017

This post is one of the first things that new employees read upon joining our team.

Connor McArthur 18 Jul 2017

How to create historical records in your database using dbt data logs.

Tristan Handy 4 Jul 2017

dbt, our open source product for data modeling, is SQL-only. SQL can, by itself, accomplish a majority of analytical (non-data science) workloads.

Tristan Handy 1 Jul 2017

Fishtown Analytics celebrates its one year anniversary today.

Tristan Handy 31 Mar 2017

You need analytics.

Tristan Handy 9 Mar 2017

Over the past nine months I’ve worked with over a dozen venture-funded startups to build out their internal analytics. In doing so, there’s a single SQL function that I have come to use surprisingly often.

Tristan Handy 18 Sep 2016

This post, originally published in 2016, was most recently updated in November 2017.

Tristan Handy 18 Sep 2016

Business intelligence tech has changed really dramatically over the past 3-4 years since the advent of cloud-based analytics databases.

Tristan Handy 13 Sep 2016

There’s a new small business that just opened up in Fishtown and it’s not a gin bar or artisanal coffee shop.

Tristan Handy 3 Aug 2016

Over the past three months I’ve been in the lab building Fishtown Analytics. There’s a lot of the company formation process that’s been fun for me. I love checklists, and treated the opening of this business as a really big one.

Tristan Handy 1 Aug 2016

Today is a big day. Today, Magento announced it has purchased RJMetrics. The RJMetrics product will form the foundation of Magento Analytics, giving Magento users powerful tools to analyze their customers’ behavior.

Tristan Handy 11 May 2016

When a software engineer starts on a new project, her first step is almost always to survey the ecosystem of open source software that exists in the problem space.

Tristan Handy 5 Apr 2016

Over the past year, I and the folks at RJMetrics have had the opportunity to observe, and participate in, a significant evolution of the analytics ecosystem. The center of gravity in mature analytics organizations has shifted away from proprietary, end-to-end tools towards more composable solutions.