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.

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