This blog post is Human-Centered Content: Written by humans for humans.
dbt is continuing its tradition of upping the ante and developing new features to really enhance the seamless data transformation experience. In their most recent installment of “What’s new in dbt Cloud,” there were many announcements. Here are a few that we are the most excited about!
SDF Acquisition
To start things off, dbt acquired SDF Labs. To directly quote dbt, it will improve the developer experience through “100x faster performance, the ability to validate code in dev to boost data quality and optimize compute costs, and rich metadata to improve lineage and enable nuanced governance use cases.” That sounds like a good deal to me!
Semantic Layer Integrations
dbt’s semantic layer has been available for integration for a few different BI tools, Tableau most notably. Sigma can now be added to that list! The preview of this is out and ready to be tested. This will allow users to connect to the metrics set in the semantic layer in dbt, creating a governed and trusted data visualization.
You can now bring in “query_with_all_group_bys” to return all valid dimensions for a given set of metrics. This will be helpful in removing the guesswork and adding some transparency for those using the semantic layer.
Auto-Exposures
This particular function is in beta, but dbt can now be used to automatically orchestrate the refreshing of Tableau dashboards when new data is available. This, to me, is one of the things I’ve been looking forward to since auto-exposures was announced.
Platform
“Release tracks” (which is a slight changing and renaming of the “versionless” options for dbt instances) allows you to manage dbt version upgrades. The default is “Latest,” which is what it is now. However, they are also adding two other options called “Compatible” and “Extended” which will let there be some customization/delay in upgrades as the customer needs.
Dark mode is now available in Preview. Need I say more?
New account homepage will allow you to “favorite” your projects to get to them quickly, as well as showing some general information about the projects like the number of models, number of sources, and documentation coverage.
In Conclusion
These are just a few of the newest additions to dbt Cloud. Come back in April when I will write another summary after their dbt Cloud Launch Showcase! And if you are interested in working with us on your dbt needs, feel free to reach out and see what we can do for you!
