Databricks Ventures Partners With dbt Labs to Welcome Analytics Engineers to the Lakehouse

Today, we are thrilled to announce Databricks Ventures’ investment in dbt Labs. With this investment, we are proud to support the growth of the company behind a pivotal open source movement. Alongside this announcement, we’re also excited to introduce major enhancements to our partnership including a native Databricks adapter for dbt, automatic query acceleration for dbt workloads in Photon and, soon, one-click connectivity through Partner Connect. We believe these improvements make the Databricks Lakehouse Platform the best place to build your next dbt project.

Why dbt Labs? At the highest level, they share our vision of an open future in which data-driven use cases are accessible and valuable across all data teams. dbt is a transformation framework that enables analytics engineers to easily build data pipelines using SQL. Everything is organized within a project, in readable SQL and YAML files, making version control, deployment, and data quality testing simple. This opinionated approach enables data practitioners to confidently deliver value across the organization while following software engineering best practices.

At Databricks, we believe that open source and open protocols such as Delta Lake and MLflow are not only fundamentally aligned with the interests of our customers, but also foster vibrant communities that build transformative software. The dbt community is a superb example of this dynamic: tens of thousands of analytics engineers collaborate, share best practices, and teach each other how to build better software across Slack, Discord and more. Our investment in dbt Labs anticipates the incredible potential of this community and the role we believe dbt Labs will play in growing it in the coming years.

In addition, we continue to partner closely with dbt Labs and the community to make Databricks the best place to develop and productionalize dbt projects. The dbt-databricks adapter is now generally available with a v1.0.0 release. It offers simplified installation, support for Delta Lake tables, and plenty of idiomatic macros that make developing and testing dbt projects a breeze. Databricks SQL, our record-setting offering for data warehousing workloads, automatically and transparently accelerates SQL expressions generated by dbt.

Lastly, through Databricks Partner Connect, customers will soon be able connect Databricks to dbt Cloud with a couple of clicks. dbt Labs offers a generous free trial that makes it easy to productionize dbt deployments, including turnkey support for scheduling jobs, CI/CD, serving documentation, monitoring and alerting, and an Integrated Developer Environment (IDE). Look out for more updates this spring.

With this investment, Databricks is excited to participate in a movement that aligns so closely with our own values. We are grateful to the dbt community for providing us with invaluable feedback, and invite you to build your next dbt project on Databricks.

To get started, please join the conversation on Slack.