Introducing dbt for Snowflake

Today, we’re excited to announce that dbt is now available on the Snowflake Marketplace as a Native App! The dbt Snowflake Native App brings dbt Cloud’s discovery and semantic capabilities to Snowflake's robust, governed architecture. Now, the dbt Cloud experience extends directly to the Snowflake UI, allowing users to jump in and gain insights from their dbt projects with one Snowflake login. Whether you're a data analyst or business decision-maker, the dbt Snowflake Native App empowers teams to access and interact with data more effectively, reducing the cost of producing insights.

How it works

Our dbt Snowflake Native App will launch with the initial experience to empower users closer to the business. In the initial release, you will gain access to Orchestration Observability, dbt Explorer, and Ask dbt, new dbt-assisted chatbot powered by the dbt Semantic Layer and Snowflake Cortex (Ask dbt is currently in beta).

Start with discovery

dbt Explorer brings data catalog capabilities directly to Snowflake and helps business analysts navigate and leverage data products to deliver trustworthy insights. Snowflake users can use dbt Explorer directly in the Snowflake UI after installing the dbt Snowflake Native App in their account. Users can quickly jump in and see the lineage and status of their dbt assets, from source to metric. Reuse what you have, not duplicate, to optimize compute costs and engineering time. Users will have access to:

• Column level lineage
• dbt Mesh cross-project lineage
• Rich metadata on the latest state of your sources and models, including freshness and last executed at
• Project Recommendations and Model Performance

Ask questions of your data

A new beta experience that we are introducing in this app is Ask dbt. Ask questions like “What is ARR growth over time?” or “What is the count of customers by plan type?” and get answers without writing a single line of SQL. It works behind the scenes by converting the natural language request into a dbt Semantic Layer query. This is done by combining Snowflake Cortex AI and dbt Semantic Layer. That query is then used to generate and execute SQL directly in Snowflake.

Unlike traditional AI chatbots, Ask dbt uses the dbt Semantic Layer to provide a critical layer of context about your dbt project, improving accuracy by 3X as observed in our benchmark. With Ask dbt, users can ask questions in natural language and receive insights in an understandable format, which can significantly speed up business processes and decision-making. What’s more magical is that the dbt Semantic Layer also powers your insights for Tableau, Google Sheets, and other BI tools, so you know that numbers are the same throughout your stack. Users can also use the SQL query Ask dbt generates to get started in their own discovery and querying.

Trust your source freshness

When you look into dbt Explorer, you can tell the freshness of the data easily. If you work with stale data, you can immediately lose trust in the result. By providing visibility into each job run, Orchestration Observability means analysts can identify and address issues at their inception. See the last time the job ran successfully and empower yourself to fix it or find the right person. If you want to kick off a job when new data has been loaded into Snowflake, check out the sample code to set up a Snowflake Triggered Job to orchestrate dbt Cloud jobs using Snowflake Tasks. Additional orchestration functionality is coming soon.

Get started

Accessing the power of dbt Cloud has never been easier. You can purchase the dbt Snowflake Native App via the public listing on Snowflake Marketplace or contact us for custom pricing. Once purchased, you can install the app and a dbt Cloud enterprise account, all within your Snowflake environment. For procurement, you can use your Snowflake committed spend to pay for the purchase and sign on Snowflake paper (No additional vendor approvals required!).

Want more?

We are so excited to continue building this experience, and we want to hear from you. Let’s chat!

Can't get enough of dbt and Snowflake? Join our upcoming webinar, Boost AI Reliability with dbt Cloud and Snowflake Cortex, to learn how integrating Snowflake Cortex with dbt Cloud can enhance your AI initiatives with reliable and accurate data, reduce AI hallucinations, accelerate data-driven projects, and lower the barrier to analytics.