What’s new in dbt - July 2025

Summer is sizzling 🌞 and things are heating up at dbt! In May, we hosted our dbt Launch Showcase, where we unveiled powerful new features to help your data teams work smarter, faster, and more securely.

But we’re not stopping there. We’re continuing to iterate and deliver even more enhancements and capabilities to empower you and your teams. Grab your cold brew and let’s dive in!

Fusion

🏎️ The dbt Fusion engine public beta is now available for Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks, marking a significant milestone toward getting Fusion in the hands of more users.

Fusion is more than an incremental improvement to dbt; it represents a fundamental shift in speed, intelligence, and developer experience for anyone building with dbt. Fusion offers:

• Instant feedback and SQL comprehension: Fusion understands Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks SQL and provides real-time error checking, code suggestions, and smarter development experiences.
• Blazing-fast performance: Expect parsing and compilation speeds up to 30x faster than dbt Core.
• Cost efficiency: When standardized on Fusion in the dbt platform (and not just running Fusion locally), users can take advantage of state-aware orchestration to automatically only runs models that have new data, reducing cloud compute costs of dbt workloads running in data platforms by 10% or more.
• Detailed governance (coming soon): Precise column-level lineage and richer metadata for enhanced data governance.

Read the launch blog and docs to learn more.

🛠️ The official dbt VS Code Extension is in beta: dbt’s official VS Code Extension, powered by the dbt Fusion engine, is now in public beta. Unlock powerful capabilities like IntelliSense autocompletion, automatic refactoring, inline CTE previews, and go-to-definition, providing a hyper-responsive and delightful development experience. Learn more in the docs.

Cross-team collaboration

🎨 dbt Canvas is GA. This AI-powered visual editing experience empowers users to create and edit dbt models using a drag-and-drop interface, context-aware AI assistance, and intuitive Git-based version control. Users can commit and open PRs directly from Canvas, streamlining collaboration and enhancing productivity. Check out the launch blog to learn more.

📈dbt Insights is in Preview. Rapidly validate ideas, explore data trends, and build visualizations in a unified, governed environment. Combine SQL, natural language querying, and built-in AI assistance to explore and query data. Learn more about Insights in the docs.

🔎 Global navigation in dbt Catalog is in Preview. The dbt Catalog (formerly dbt Explorer) now offers global navigation across all your dbt projects and expands beyond dbt models, empowering you to search and explore Snowflake assets, such as tables and views, directly within dbt. This unified, seamless experience helps teams move faster, answer critical questions, and make more informed decisions - all without switching tools or duplicating efforts.

📈 Power BI integration for the Semantic Layer is in Preview. At long last! You can now connect Microsoft Power BI directly to the dbt Semantic Layer. Centralize your business logic and metric definitions in dbt and build your Power BI dashboards from consistent, trusted, and low-latency data—in both Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service. Check out the docs to learn more.

🔗 Trino and Postgres join the Semantic Layer. You can now query metrics defined in the dbt Semantic Layer directly from your Trino and Postgres setups. This expansion empowers teams using these databases to unlock seamless cross-team collaboration, unified analytics definitions, and faster insights without ever leaving dbt. Plus, enjoy quicker query responses when leveraging the Semantic Layer Gateway (SLG) for these adapters.

AI

🤖 dbt MCP server is in public beta. The dbt MCP server provides structured, governed context for AI systems. Integrate trusted dbt models, metrics, tests, and lineage directly into your AI workflows, powering smarter, safer, and more trustworthy AI-driven decisions. Check out this blog post for more information.

Platform

💰Cost management dashboard is in Preview. Quickly track warehouse spend and identify optimization opportunities directly within dbt. Drill down by account, project, and model, clearly tie actions to savings, and reduce unnecessary costs with Fusion’s state-aware orchestration. The cost management dashboard is available for Snowflake customers. Learn more about cost management in dbt.

🔑 SCIM is officially here. Say goodbye to manual user management. With SCIM (System for Cross-Domain Identity Management), dbt admins can automate user provisioning, de-provisioning, group management, and license assignments directly from their identity providers like Okta and Entra ID. Available now for Enterprise and Enterprise+ customers (note: not currently available for legacy Enterprise plans). dbt’s integration is fully SCIM 2.0 compliant, supporting any compatible identity provider. Dive into the docs to see how SCIM can simplify your life.

🧊 Iceberg catalog integrations. Iceberg catalog integrations. Beat the summer heat with our coolest catalog integrations yet for Snowflake and BigQuery. dbt can now read and write metadata in built-in catalogs like Snowflake Horizon and Biglake Metastore. You can also effortlessly create Iceberg tables in Snowflake and BigQuery without sacrificing your lineage, observability, or your peace of mind. This exciting step forward lays the groundwork for cross-platform data mesh and opens doors to further enhancements, because optionality is always cooler. Check out the docs for Apache Iceberg support in dbt to learn more.

What’s next

We're excited to hear your feedback on these new features! In the meantime, join us July 30th & 31st for regional sessions on building reliable AI agents with the dbt MCP server where you'll learn how to power intelligent, governed workflows at scale. Save your spot here.

Stay cool and stay tuned for more exciting dbt updates coming soon!