dbt Labs Acquires SDF Labs to Offer Robust SQL Comprehension


dbt Labs, a pioneer in analytics engineering, is acquiring SDF Labs, the team of former Meta and Microsoft engineering leaders behind SDF, a next-generation data transformation technology—enabling dbt Labs to integrate SDF’s powerful multi-dialect, dbt-native SQL comprehension capabilities into dbt.

According to the companies, this integration will deliver orders of magnitude improvements to dbt performance and enhance the developer experience with new levels of efficiency, data velocity, and data quality.

“We are acquiring SDF to bring SQL comprehension into dbt and usher in a new era of ‘what’s possible’ for analytics: supercharging developer productivity and heightening data quality, all while optimizing data platform costs,” said Tristan Handy, founder and CEO of dbt Labs. “SDF’s technology will bring a massive upgrade to the heart of dbt and the dbt user experience. This isn’t an incremental improvement to dbt; it’s a step-function change, and I’m very excited to work alongside the team to get this technology into the hands of dbt users everywhere.”

SDF Labs, which emerged from stealth in June 2024, has focused its efforts on building a state-of-the-art toolset and framework to address one of the analytics industry’s biggest complexities—compiling and understanding SQL that users write, regardless of platform. Its technology, built on the Rust programming language and natively integrated into dbt, solves this challenge at lightning speed and at scale.

SDF validates the SQL code a user is writing, immediately as it’s being written. This real-time feedback allows developers to embrace modern development accelerants like code completion and content assist as well as pinpoint errors and ensure data quality far earlier in the development process.

According to SDF, this expedites data velocity, boosts data quality, and makes organizations much more efficient in their analytics practices.
SQL comprehension also adds a new layer of detailed metadata to dbt’s table- and column-level lineage for enhanced data classification, enabling organizations to accomplish nuanced governance use cases. These capabilities will now be part of dbt.

As part of the acquisition, the SDF Labs team will become a part of dbt Labs.

“Bringing SDF and dbt together is going to completely transform the dbt user experience with unprecedented levels of speed, accuracy, and velocity,” said Lukas Schulte, SDF Labs’ CEO. “The SDF Team and I are so excited to magnify the impact that our technology can have by powering the data control plane that sets the standard for the future of data analytics.”

For more information about this news, visit www.getdbt.com



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