Dbt Labs acquires SDF Labs

[sullivanmatt]

You 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.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.c...

Little marketing switcharoo there to avoid pissing off their future owners.

[trickyager]

Congrats 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.

[thenaturalist]

dbt Labs is a Series D company with hundreds of millions in funding and a 4.2 billion USD valuation at their last round.

Their CEO and founder spoke of an IPO in 2022.

Let's not pretend they are still remotely close to their humble beginnings or were able to get this far without credibly demonstrating they have a plan for how to make enterprises bleed through their nose for their product.

That's the future.

On the flipside, building a dbt adjacent product enhancing or complementing capabilities is basically a sure way of how to get bought.

[mritchie712]

I'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/) 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).

[datadrivenangel]

Not to mention the sudden pricing change at the end of 2022 that doubled costs for most cloud customers.

[itsoktocry]

Have they introduced any interesting features outside of core? Most of it seems like fluff, or there are better alternatives.

[suchar]

Could you point to some functionalities removed from dbt Core? I love dbt and use it where applicable but I have not yet encountered a loss of features upon upgrade yet - it would be useful to be aware what kind of features get removed

[CalRobert]

We're using Dagster cloud with integrated DBT core and I don't really see what the draw of DBT cloud is - perhaps a bit easier to get set up?

[jmclnx]

I first thought this was SDF (https://sdf.org/) and thought how could this happen.

Again shows we have run out of 3 letter acronyms :)

[nbk_2000]

Glad I wasn't the only one! ;)

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Heh, I was just starting to look at SDF and SQL Mesh to see if they actually addressed any of the dbt pain points.

[talos_]

dbt 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

[wood_spirit]

What is your initial impression and pros and cons?

(Asking as I kinda wish my company’s opinionated dbt had made some different choices)

[mritchie712]

Same. dbt feels like angularjs, I want the svelte alternative.

[capital_guy]

Seems 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]

It 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.

[bcoates]

I'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]

It 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.

[barrrrald]

Congrats to everyone, very excited to see how these come together

[hkt]

I 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 :)

[qeternity]

Interesting that their pricing page is already 404'ing: https://www.sdf.com/pricing

[mritchie712]

they were charging for compute: $0.16/vCPU min

https://web.archive.org/web/20241217210804/https://www.sdf.c...

[GoToRO]

What does Dbt Labs do? I've read their website, but I need a concrete example.

[CaveTech]

In simplest of terms, it's a templating and orchestration layer for data pipelines which which compiles purely into SQL expressions.

[ra]

Think 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.

[aradox66]

It takes your data operation from 1995 to 2025

[ewuhic]

Given replies to this comment, I cannot think of a more useless thing. Yarn for sql in cloud, why?? Why is that needed???

[nwhnwh]

These days I get to know about services only when they get acquired.

[dark-star]

For a second I thought that this was about sdf.org ... but it is about sdf.com (which I have never heard of before)

[DrillShopper]

As someone who has been MetaARPA for about 20 years at this point I would be _pissed_ if they sold out.

[nbk_2000]

Same here, small panic attack ensued ;P