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Dbt Labs acquires SDF Labs
- nwhnwh 2y agoThese days I get to know about services only when they get acquired.
- qeternity 2y agoInteresting that their pricing page is already 404'ing: https://www.sdf.com/pricing https://www.sdf.com/pricing
- mritchie712 2y agothey were charging for compute: $0.16/vCPU min https://web.archive.org/web/20241217210804/https://www.sdf.com/pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20241217210804/https://www.sdf.c...
- mritchie712 2y agoolder version: Professional For development teams looking to scale fast. $1,250/mo Annually Everything in Plus Up to 1,500 models Unlimited Team Members Direct Slack Connect support Unlimited compile, test, & runs
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dark-star 2y agoFor a second I thought that this was about sdf.org ... but it is about sdf.com (which I have never heard of before)
- DrillShopper 2y agoAs someone who has been MetaARPA for about 20 years at this point I would be _pissed_ if they sold out.
- nbk_2000 2y agoSame here, small panic attack ensued ;P
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoHeh, I was just starting to look at SDF and SQL Mesh to see if they actually addressed any of the dbt pain points.
- mritchie712 2y agoSame. dbt feels like angularjs, I want the svelte alternative.
- wood_spirit 2y agoWhat is your initial impression and pros and cons? (Asking as I kinda wish my company’s opinionated dbt had made some different choices)
- apwell23 2y agocon is some ppl just go crazy with jinja and create a mess. Its fine if you just stick to the basics.
- grajaganDev 2y agoPlease watch out for Server Side Template Injection.
- talos_ 2y agodbt needs to play catch up against SQLMesh feature-wise, so they bought their other competitor SDF. SQLMesh seems to have more development velocity, and dbt will need to execute a smooth transition and integration to catch up. For context, the team behind SQLMesh also develops SQLGlot, which powers the features dbt attempts to implement
- NortySpock 2y agoTo expand on this, dbt uses Jinja templating in your SQL to allow the developer to modify the query so it can be expanded at "compile-time" into the target database SQL dialect. (uni-directional, write once deploy anywhere). The key features are CICD, test automation, and transformation sequence automation. SQLGlot is a Abstract Symbol Tree SQL Dialect transpiler that could (in theory) convert from one dialect to another (bi-directional). SQLMesh appears to combine both of the above into one tool that sounds like it's even better.
- jmclnx 2y agoI first thought this was SDF (https://sdf.org/ https://sdf.org/) and thought how could this happen. Again shows we have run out of 3 letter acronyms :)
- nbk_2000 2y agoGlad I wasn't the only one! ;)
- trickyager 2y agoCongrats to the SDF team for their exit. Alas, dbt Labs has developed a reputation for rug pulling functionality from dbt Core and gating most of their differentiating features behind dbt Cloud. I cannot see this type of consolidation being in the best interest of the dbt community.
- mritchie712 2y agoI've been on the lookout for a lighter, faster version of dbt and I was hoping sdf might be it. For our (https://www.definite.app/ https://www.definite.app/) use case, I'd love to have something that compiles client-side, but in general dbt just feels like a lot of work to set up for what most of our customers actually need (simple transform to create tables and views).
- thenaturalist 2y agoA lot of work to set up? I'm quite surprised to hear that. It's literally pip install, a single file for your DB config and that's it. 30-40 seconds. I'm in no way affiliated with dbt but have worked with the tool since 2018. Lighter, faster, sure, but hard to set up? I'm not sure where you'd want to cut corners on setup.
- apwell23 2y agoI think they mean setting up in production.
- thenaturalist 2y agoEven that... the beauty of it and why it took off as much as it did is simplicity. Dockerfile, env var injection and you're done.
- dangoldin 2y agoI'm sure you've heard of SQLMesh but that seems like a potential fit. Or is it still too heavy handed?
- barrrrald 2y agoCongrats to everyone, very excited to see how these come together
- hkt 2y agoI briefly thought this was about sdf.org and was very, very sad. Congrats on the exit to the sdf.com people though, and relief to the sdf.org userbase :)
- capital_guy 2y agoSeems like a great pair. Especially the bit about static analysis instead of using string parsing. Frankly, the dbt product hasn't really evolved much. I've been a bit disappointed with its lack of evolution toward this stuff organically. The "modern data stack" is in kind of in a magic position where they are working at very technical companies but the people using it are not SWEs who can build out the tooling themselves so they are just getting buckets of money without a really big value proposition. My team self hosts a dbt core workflow and it's been almost trivial to build out dbt's paid product ourselves
- thenaturalist 2y agoIt hasn't evolved 'cause there is no free lunch. It has evolved quite a bit behind the paywall - as has the paywall. Most if not all of this stuff will land behind, not before said wall.
- capital_guy 2y agoI guess if they integrate this then that will be the case, I'm not sure I'm convinced that much stuff is going on in dbt cloud that I can't do in dbt core. A comparison that's obvious to my team is the release cadence of Metabase, which we also self-host. The frequent rollout of new features in Metabase is great and gives me more confidence in the product. But I'm not in the position to decide whether to cough up the $ for the paid version so I suppose it's moot.
- GoToRO 2y agoWhat does Dbt Labs do? I've read their website, but I need a concrete example.
- CaveTech 2y agoIn simplest of terms, it's a templating and orchestration layer for data pipelines which which compiles purely into SQL expressions.
- grajaganDev 2y agoHow is it different from Looker and LookML?
- anon84873628 2y agoLooker is mostly a reporting tool. LookML let's you define some transformations that happen at query time. There is a little bit of materialization functionality with the PDTs, but that doesn't seem intended as a replacement for other "ELT" tools.
- aradox66 2y agoIt takes your data operation from 1995 to 2025
- ra 2y agoThink of dbt as yarn for SQL, only the SQL is built from jinja templates. dbtlabs also sells dbt cloud, which provides a runtime for your dbt projects.
- ewuhic 2y agoGiven replies to this comment, I cannot think of a more useless thing. Yarn for sql in cloud, why?? Why is that needed???
- sullivanmatt 2y agoYou can tell when this deal started to come together by looking at the history of the website on Wayback Machine. In fall of 2024, the website had a checklist comparing SDF to dbt and claiming SDF had a better feature set than dbt Core (page rendering is hit and miss right now for whatever reason): https://web.archive.org/web/20240919110243/https://www.sdf.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240919110243/https://www.sdf.c... In December 2024 the page had been updated to now compare "dbt Core" against "SDF with dbt": https://web.archive.org/web/20241217172451/https://www.sdf.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241217172451/https://www.sdf.c... Little marketing switcharoo there to avoid pissing off their future owners.
- bcoates 2y agoI'm curious if this product actually works because I was beating my head against almost exactly this very recently. I haven't checked yet, but is SDF schema-dependent? For some reason, all sql comprehending/transforming tools I can find are either too trivial to be useful or require an exact schema to operate, both of which are too brittle to be useful when I try to use them in anger.
- CaveTech 2y agoIt compiles to SQL, so in since sense yes it is schema dependent. As mentioned in the article DBT itself has no understanding of semantics, so it’s not enforced by DBT directly but if it doesn’t compile to working SQL expressions it’s obviously not going to work.