Coalesce 2024 highlights

Coalesce 2024 is a wrap. Whether you were with us in person or online or catching up now, here’s what happened in Vegas at Coalesce 2024. Here’s hoping it stays with you wherever you are.

A quick aside, I attended Coalesce for the first time last year. The part that really stood out for me was that people really wanted to be at Coalesce. People were excited to be at Coalesce. How many conferences have you attended out of obligation? Each year the dbt Community gathers at Coalesce to be together with peers and friends. Yes, folks get practical advice for scaling their data organization, yes training, yes networking, all the the things. But there’s something incredible that this community just wants to be together.

My single favorite thing at Coalesce this year was the wall for the dbt community to share how dbt has transformed their lives. People shared truly life-changing stories. We had to clear the wall several times for folks to add new stories. This is real and personal to everyone, and such a delight to see.

dbt Cloud product announcements

So. many. announcements. The overarching theme at Coalesce is One dbt, because dbt works across clouds, across data platforms, across teams, and across personas. This is a framework for everyone in the data ecosystem to solve analytics problems together. You can see this embedded in all the features for dbt Cloud—the data control plane for enterprise analytics—to orchestrate and observe your entire data ecosystem.

“One dbt gave me goosebumps.” - Joseph Aranez, Principal Solutions Engineer at Trust & Will.

dbt Cloud centralizes metadata across your business, and provides an interface for every data stakeholder to contribute. Here’s just some of what we announced:

• dbt Copilot is an AI engine for data teams to accelerate their analytics workflows. dbt Copilot helps users get more done using the power of generative AI. It makes everyone interacting with data more productive. Automate away the mundane so you and your data team can focus on projects that matter.
• Cross-platform dbt Mesh: Support for the Apache Iceberg table format allows us to extend dbt Mesh’s cross-project references to now support cross-platform references. This is crucial for maintaining data governance in the complex, multi-platform environments we’re seeing more and more of. Snowflake support is currently in beta, and Athena, Spark, Databricks, Starburst/Trino, and Dremio are GA.
• dbt Cloud’s new visual editing experience is a drag-and-drop environment to build and explore dbt models. This new interface makes it easy for less technical people to participate in the data development process, BUT it’s also still dbt. That means all models are tested, documented, and version controlled, and you can see the SQL as the projects build. Your data team can see what your business partners are creating and work with them more closely on projects.
• dbt Core 1.9: You can now use the new microbatch strategy to optimize your largest datasets, and a streamlined dbt snapshot configuration.
• For a complete list of our product announcements, check out our product launch post for everything from Advanced CI, adapters for Teradata and AWS Athena, and auto-exposures with Tableau.

Salesforce Data Cloud and dbt

Speaking of Tableau, we announced that we are teaming up with Salesforce to unite dbt and Salesforce Data Cloud AI. Salesforce Data Cloud, Tableau, and Agentforce customers now gain access to dbt Semantic Layer, data modeling layer integrations.

"Through our new partnership with dbt, we are aiming to broaden the trust, extensibility, and value of Tableau by incorporating dbt models and metrics directly into the product. This will bring together two industry-leading solutions to accelerate time to value, foster seamless collaboration, and provide a world-class analytics experience to our customers." - Ali Tore, SVP of Advanced Analytics, Tableau

dbt executive summit and customer advisory board

dbt grows with the data leaders in the community. At Coalesce, we were thrilled to host our first executive summit—a forum for 72 executives to share, through peer exchanges, how data and AI are shaping the future of customer experiences. Tristan Handy, the CEO and founder of dbt Labs, and Brandon Sweeney, the President and COO of dbt Labs, hosted the summit. The executive summit included industry experts, including AI expert Allie Miller, who also gave our Day 2 keynote.

We also had a chance to host our Customer Advisory Board at Coalese. This was a chance for top customer executives to talk about the future of data engineering, analytics, and AI. The goal is to engage some of our most innovative customers to surface best practices and insights to inform and validate our product plans.

dbt community award winners

Coalesce is a community event, so it was a real joy to celebrate dbt community members who embody what it means to be an advocate within the dbt community. This year’s winners included a data manager who helped people in the dbt Slack with 2,375 posts(!) in the past year and the founder of the Lagos dbt meetup.

Please make sure to join the dbt community if you haven’t already.

dbt partner award winners

Coalesce is a great chance for dbt partners to come together. The dbt community is wide, and when we talk about One dbt, we’re also talking about all those who contribute to the dbt partner ecosystem. We have tripled the number of implementation partners and doubled our technology partners since the Technology Partner Program launched in 2022.

We were thrilled to announce our 2024 consulting partner awards at Coalesce, including our Global Services Partner of the Year phData.

We also announced at Coalesce the appointment of Shawn Toldo as Vice President, Worldwide Partner Ecosystem.

Coalesce sponsors

A key part of making this Coalesce happen is our sponsors. A big shout out to all of our partners, including our platinum sponsors AWS, Snowflake, and Tableau.

Coalesce 2025

Sessions will be published on YouTube, and conversations and connections will continue on dbt Slack. Join us there.

Coalesce is our highlight of the year, and it’s not an exaggeration that this was the best one yet. It was so much fun that we’re running it back next year. We’ll see you back in Las Vegas for Coalesce 2025.