Hacker Remix

Dbt Labs acquires SDF Labs

109 points by karakanb 5 days ago | 48 comments

sullivanmatt 4 days ago

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 4 days ago

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 4 days ago

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.

trickyager 4 days ago

I agree with you 100%, and we may both be correct!

mritchie712 4 days ago

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).

thenaturalist 4 days ago

A lot of work to set up?

I'm quite surprised to hear that.

It's literally pip install, a single file for your DB config and that's it. 30-40 seconds.

I'm in no way affiliated with dbt but have worked with the tool since 2018.

Lighter, faster, sure, but hard to set up?

I'm not sure where you'd want to cut corners on setup.

apwell23 4 days ago

I think they mean setting up in production.

thenaturalist 4 days ago

Even that... the beauty of it and why it took off as much as it did is simplicity.

Dockerfile, env var injection and you're done.

dangoldin 4 days ago

I'm sure you've heard of SQLMesh but that seems like a potential fit. Or is it still too heavy handed?

datadrivenangel 4 days ago

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

itsoktocry 4 days ago

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

bcoates 4 days ago

Yeah my experience is much closer to that, I generally point my clients to core over cloud even if they're indifferent to the cost. (Sorry dbt guys, love your product, but somebody read the strategy memo backwards and you've got lock-out not lock-in. Replacing my IDE, ci/cd, or orchestration are "dealbreakers", not "features")

jmclnx 4 days ago

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 4 days ago

Glad I wasn't the only one! ;)

0cf8612b2e1e 4 days ago

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_ 4 days ago

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

NortySpock 4 days ago

To expand on this, dbt uses Jinja templating in your SQL to allow the developer to modify the query so it can be expanded at "compile-time" into the target database SQL dialect. (uni-directional, write once deploy anywhere). The key features are CICD, test automation, and transformation sequence automation.

SQLGlot is a Abstract Symbol Tree SQL Dialect transpiler that could (in theory) convert from one dialect to another (bi-directional).

SQLMesh appears to combine both of the above into one tool that sounds like it's even better.

wood_spirit 4 days ago

What is your initial impression and pros and cons?

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

apwell23 4 days ago

con is some ppl just go crazy with jinja and create a mess. Its fine if you just stick to the basics.

grajaganDev 4 days ago

Please watch out for Server Side Template Injection.

mritchie712 4 days ago

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