dbt Labs Acquires SDF Labs to Introduce Robust SQL Comprehension into dbt and Supercharge Developer Efficiency

PHILADELPHIA, January 14, 2025 – dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, has acquired SDF Labs, the team of former Meta and Microsoft engineering leaders behind SDF, the next-generation data transformation technology. The acquisition will integrate SDF’s powerful multi-dialect, dbt-native SQL comprehension capabilities into dbt, delivering orders of magnitude improvements to dbt performance and enhancing the developer experience with new levels of efficiency, data velocity and data quality.

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. 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.

“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.”

dbt Labs has a strong track record of building experiences on top of and around the data workflow to solve problems at enterprise scale (as with dbt Mesh), democratize data analytics to more types of collaborators (via capabilities like dbt Semantic Layer, dbt Explorer, dbt Copilot and the recently announced visual editing experience), all designed to help organizations mature their analytics practices and embrace the Analytics Development Lifecycle (ADLC). For the more than 50,000 teams who use dbt every week, these capabilities are critical to transforming data into reliable business insights. With this acquisition, dbt becomes an even more robust, reliable, and delightful platform to power enterprise data practices.

As part of the acquisition, the SDF Labs team will become a part of dbt Labs. SDF Labs CEO Lukas Schulte is energized by the opportunity to introduce these powerful capabilities to even more organizations and members of the dbt Community.

“Bringing SDF and dbt together is going to completely transform the dbt user experience with unprecedented levels of speed, accuracy, and velocity,” said Schulte. “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.”

dbt Labs’ key industry partners also are eager to see the impact this new set of capabilities will have on users in the coming year as dbt integrates SDF into the ecosystem.

“As demand for data intelligence grows, high-quality, real-time data is a must-have. dbt Labs is a key partner in our data warehousing business, which has grown 150% in the past year,” said Roger Murff, Head of Product Partnerships and Ecosystem at Databricks. “dbt developers can now build faster, with richer metadata, on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, and we look forward to seeing what our joint customers build in the new year.”

Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake, added: “dbt empowers enterprise customers to quickly launch on Snowflake, supporting customers’ long-term success as they build governed data and AI products on our platform. With this acquisition, we are thrilled that dbt developers will be able to more rapidly innovate with richer metadata, accelerating their value from Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud.”

For dbt Cloud customer Bilt Rewards, this acquisition strengthens the role of dbt in their organization’s data practice and introduces new potential.

"dbt is a critical component in our data stack that empowers our teams to streamline how data is managed and distributed across our organization. We’re excited about the addition of the SDF capabilities into dbt and the productivity improvements it will bring to our dbt development,” said James Dorado, VP Data Analytics, Bilt Rewards. “This acquisition positions dbt Labs as a best-in-class data development platform and will help us accelerate our development and ship data products faster.”

For more detail on dbt Labs’ acquisition, read Tristan Handy’s blog post at http://getdbt.com/blog/dbt-labs-acquires-sdf-labs.

About dbt Labs

Since 2016, dbt Labs has been on a mission to help analysts create and disseminate organizational knowledge. dbt Labs pioneered the practice of analytics engineering, built the primary tool in the analytics engineering toolbox, and has been fortunate enough to see a fantastic community coalesce to help push the boundaries of the analytics engineering workflow. Today, there are 50,000 teams using dbt every week.