The dbt Fusion engine public beta is now available on Redshift

We’re excited to share that teams using Amazon Redshift can now participate in the public beta of the dbt Fusion engine. This brings the number of supported data platforms to four: BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake, and now Redshift.

This marks another key step toward general availability of the dbt Fusion engine. Redshift has long been one of the most widely used data warehouses across the dbt community, and now teams on Redshift can experience the power, speed, and intelligence of Fusion.

The dbt Fusion engine now supports Redshift

The dbt Fusion engine isn’t just a small iteration. It’s a complete re-architecture and re-imagining of dbt. Built in Rust (a language known for performance) and capable of deep SQL comprehension, Fusion enables blazing-fast development workflows, real-time intelligence, and smarter orchestration of your data transformations.

What does that mean for Redshift users? It means:

• Significant performance gains. Parse performance is up to 30x faster than with dbt Core, meaning developers can iterate more rapidly, stay in flow, and reduce time to insight.
• A vastly improved development experience. Fusion doesn’t just pass your SQL to your warehouse: it also understands it. With native support for Redshift SQL, developers get real-time feedback, error checking, and intelligent suggestions as they write code. All of this happens without needing to query your warehouse. Excitingly, our powerful new dbt VS Code extension brings the full power of Fusion to your local development experience as well.

• Built-in cost optimization. Fusion introduces state-aware orchestration, which allows dbt to understand what’s changed in your project and intelligently run only the necessary models. That means fewer redundant workloads, unlocking a reduction of ~10% in cloud compute spend.

• Enhanced governance (coming soon). In the coming months, Fusion will also get support for sensitive data classification and tracking, allowing for even more robust data governance with dbt. This will help teams manage risk, enforce policies, and lay the groundwork for safe AI adoption and regulatory compliance.

Who benefits from using Fusion on Redshift?

Data developers and data analysts using Redshift with dbt will notice a dramatic boost. Fusion helps teams iterate faster, boost data quality, and scale confidently.

Meanwhile, organizations prioritizing cost optimization or data governance will benefit from Fusion’s deep metadata awareness and more intelligent orchestration.

Getting started with Fusion on Redshift

Fusion is currently in public beta, which means:

• We’re actively collecting feedback to help us improve it
• You can expect the experience to continue to evolve and get more refined
• You can enable or disable it at any time (if your project(s) are eligible)

Note that, at this time, username + password is the only supported authentication method on Redshift. Expect more additions here soon.

Ready to see it in action?

If you’re a managed dbt customer and your Redshift project is eligible, you can start upgrading to Fusion now.

If you’re not, you can also use Fusion locally through the dbt VS Code Extension or by downloading the permissively licensed Fusion source code and binary.

See what’s next

The best place to experience Fusion in action, and hear directly from customers and dbt Labs leadership, is Coalesce 2025 (Coming Oct 13-16).

Join us to explore how the dbt Fusion engine is transforming the dbt developer experience and reshaping modern data workflows. Lock in your spot today.