The dbt community chronicle: December 2025
last updated on Feb 12, 2026
What's changing in analytics engineering? The 2026 State of Analytics Engineering survey is now live, and your input helps define industry standards for titles, skills, compensation, and tooling.
Hiring managers and industry leaders rely on this report. Take 10 minutes to ensure your reality is represented.
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Pro tip: Share with teammates. A stronger sample size means sharper benchmarks for everyone.
Analytics data engineer benchmark is live
On December 10th, over 700 data practitioners joined the quarterly community webinar featuring Benn Stancil and Jason Ganz for an introduction to the Analytics Data Engineer (ADE) benchmark.
Resources:
- Watch the webinar replay
- Explore the GitHub repository
- Join the discussion in #tools-ade-bench
Community contributions
2025 reflections: What data practitioners learned
In the dbt Community Slack, members shared skills, habits, and mindsets gained through the dbt community in 2025:
Eddy Zulkifly 🇨🇦
"Using a dev container to run dbt Fusion allows you to have both dbt Core and dbt Fusion running in the same machine..."
Marcelo Bour 🇦🇷
"Jumping into different threads with real-life data problems is a great way to learn new things in an unstructured but powerful way."
Jairus Martinez 🇺🇸
"The importance of lowering the access barriers to tools like LLMs and MCPs for agentic dbt dev workflows..."
Abraham Setiawan 🇸🇪
"I learned to trust incremental changes, adapt to the situation, and share the small wins."
Sebastian Freiman 🇦🇷
"Desde la buena experiencia que tuve en Coalesce, adquirà el hábito de ir si puedo a eventos in-person para conectar o re-conectar."
Angela Alves 🇧🇷
"O meetup foi bastante importante para mim esse ano, conectar com mais pessoas do meu paÃs e conversar sobre os desafios que compartilhamos e aprendermos uns com os outros."
Coalesce 2025 community awards
The 2025 dbt Community Awards celebrated practitioners who make dbt more than code. These builders, mentors, and community leaders show up daily to help others become self-sufficient data practitioners.
Watch the highlights:
- Community Keynote with Grace Goheen and Jeremy Cohen (60 minutes)
- Community Awards Ceremony, with Bolaji Oyejide (10 minutes)
2025 dbt community award winners
- Community Champion: Marcelo Bour, Analytics Engineer at Dynamic Data 🇦🇷
- dbt Ambassador: Bruno Lima, Analytics Engineer at phData 🇧🇷
- Analytics Engineer of the Year: Silja Mardla, Analytics Engineering Manager at Bolt 🇪🇪
- Data Engineer of the Year: William Whelan, Data Engineer at Storypark 🇳🇿
- Data Analyst of the Year: Millie Symns, Senior BI Analyst at Justworks 🇺🇸
- Design Partner of the Year: Peter Empey, Staff Analytics Engineer at GitHub 🇺🇸
- Code Contributor of the Year: Yu Ishikawa, Principal Data Architect 🇯🇵
- Meetup Organizer of the Year: Karen Hsieh, Principal Product Manager 🇹🇼
- Igniter of the Year: Shinya Takimoto, Analytics Engineer at 10X 🇯🇵
- Commit Comedian of the Year: Raz Widrich, Head of Brand at Euno 🇮🇱
Connect with these practitioners on LinkedIn to learn from their expertise.
Community-built tools and packages
The #i-made-this Slack channel showcases work-in-progress projects and learning from community builders.
Recent projects:
Alphonse Polycea built an automated data news monitoring site and welcomes feedback on features and bug reports.
Egor Tarasenko released an open-source plugin unifying dbt lineage with Superset metadata, creating an AI-powered interface inside Superset.
Matthew Senick published a package simplifying ML evaluation with one macro call generating 27 classification metrics and 9 regression metrics.
Pavel Filyanin built a command-line interface for instant metadata extraction from dbt artifacts.
Amaan Nawab created an AI agent team that builds data connectors automatically.
Lewis Davies shared a package eliminating the need for complete, up-to-date production data copies in development schemas, reducing time and warehouse costs.
Community connections
Finding your people in a 70,000+ member community
Most active channels:
- #advice-dbt-help
- #dbt-fusion-engine
- #tools-dbt-mcp
- #db-snowflake
- #jobs
Popular database channels:
- #db-snowflake
- #db-bigquery
- #db-databricks-and-spark
- #db-redshift
- #db-athena
Newest channels:
- #tools-ade-bench
- #topic-agentic-analytics
- #data-for-social-good
December's most active community members
These practitioners drive engagement, answer questions, and strengthen the dbt community:
- Marcelo Bour
- Jeremy Chia
- Morgan Kerle
- Karthik Rajashekaran
- Matěj Novák
- Tobie Tusing
- Noel Gomez
- Amey Khedekar
- Gabriel Grunberg
- Vince Faller
Top new members this month
Welcome to practitioners making their presence felt in their first 30 days:
- Sandeep Uikey
- Daniel Gebreneset
- Mitchell Johnson
- Yi Hahn Pang
- Mpho Kubeka
- Michael Mabinuola
- Viktor Osetrov
- Elvin Shahsuvarli
- Sarah Martens
- Jonathan Markland
- Ryan Donohue
- Bruno Freitas
How to become a featured community member:
- Engage actively in Slack channels
- Contribute to dbt's GitHub repositories
- Attend local dbt meetups
- Share dbt-related work on LinkedIn
- Participate in the Data Career Transformations podcast
Career development
dbt certification before year-end
December is an ideal time to invest learning and development budgets before they expire. Consider advancing your dbt skills with certification.
Available courses:
Explore courses from beginner to advanced at learn.getdbt.com
Join the dbt community
The dbt community grows through contributions from practitioners worldwide. Whether you're building tools, sharing knowledge, organizing meetups, or advancing your skills, your participation strengthens the entire ecosystem.
Get involved:
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