The new dbt Cloud development experience from Coalesce 2023

"No matter where you're developing, dbt Cloud is the best platform for running with dbt."

- Greg McKeon, product manager at dbt Labs

Product managers from dbt Labs—Jeremy Cohen and Greg McKeon—give a demonstration of the new features and updates in dbt Cloud. They walk through the dbt IDE and the Cloud CLI, as well as discuss future developments of the tool.

dbt Cloud offers a seamless and efficient developer experience

Jeremy and Greg explain the unique advantages of dbt Cloud over traditional development environments, showing that it simplifies and streamlines the development process. "We're taking these little pain points that make your experience with dbt not optimal and turning them into opportunities to show you something delightful, or cool, or interesting," says Greg.

Jeremy goes on to demonstrate dbt Cloud's seamless integration with various development tools. He shows how dbt Cloud can automatically install dependencies without the need for manual intervention. He also shows how dbt Cloud automatically runs taps, eliminating the need for developers to run this process every time they open the IDE.

Jeremey and Greg explain that dbt Cloud can now execute commands that were previously unsupported. The dbt Cloud IDE and the dbt Cloud CLI could be used in tandem, offering a unified and efficient development experience. "Everything you can do in Core, you can do in dbt Cloud," says Greg.

The dbt Cloud CLI provides a unified development platform

Jeremy and Greg emphasize the advantages of using Cloud CLI, which they say presents a more unified platform for running dbt. Greg explained that the Cloud CLI is the best way to interact with all the different Cloud APIs.

Greg notes that the Cloud CLI can manage all the power of dbt Cloud, including dbt Semantic Layer, and that dbt Cloud is the best platform for using dbt.

“No matter where you're developing, dbt Cloud is the best platform for running dbt because you have access to things like Explorer. You get to centralize all of your credentials, and you get a better developer experience for the reasons we just saw, with many more enhancements coming,” he adds.

dbt Cloud's future capabilities promise more efficiency and integration

Jeremy and Greg shed light on dbt Cloud's plans for the future, hinting at more robust and integrated features. "So, there's a lot of cool stuff that can come because we have this one unified development platform,” says Greg.

He adds, “We've thought a lot about Explorer Integrations for Dev builds…the ability to see where an individual Dev build is, and the tests that it's passed, giving you feedback and information on that in whatever Git provider you're using.”

Greg and Jeremey’s key insights

• dbt IDE now automatically installs dependencies, making the developer experience more efficient
• The new back end of the dbt IDE allows for faster feature building and parity between what you can run in dbt Core and what you can run inside of the IDE
• The defer to production feature in dbt IDE allows for faster builds and cost-saving as it uses models from the upstream production environment if they don't exist in the local Dev schema.
• dbt Cloud CLI allows for centralized running of dbt builds, providing access to all the power of dbt Cloud
• The Cloud CLI is the way to interact with all the different Cloud APIs going forward