dbt Labs has Acquired SDF
Bringing the most advanced SQL understanding to your favorite data tool.
Announcement
Two years ago, I founded SDF Labs with my father Wolfram and our two phenomenal co-founders Michael and Elias.
We had a bold vision; to bring deeper SQL understanding, formal reasoning, and static analysis to data development. In other areas of software engineering precise error reporting, dependency tracking, and optimized code generation are powered by advanced tooling grounded in formal semantics. SQL tooling has long been left behind. Our mission has been to bridge that gap and redefine what's possible for SQL developers.
In the last 2 years we’ve come a long way. We’ve built a revolutionary SQL toolset with Executable Semantics for the SQL dialects of many Cloud Data Warehouse providers. That toolset consists of:
Multi-dialect SQL compilation, validation, and semantic understanding
A Data Classification system backed by Information Flow Theory
Native integration with the fastest single node execution runtime: Apache Datafusion
A Novel SQL conformance test suite with hundreds of thousands of tests
The most accurate column-level lineage on the market
A SQL linter that’s 1000x more performant than the current state of the art
Now, we have the incredible opportunity to bring this treasure trove of technologies to the entire dbt Community:
I’m beyond excited to share that dbt Labs has acquired SDF Labs!
Over 50 thousand data teams use dbt today. Over the past 8 years, dbt has changed the way data is practiced globally, driving the adoption of software engineering and DevOps best practices within the entire analytics ecosystem.
While dbt’s capabilities are so comprehensive as to drive an entire ecosystem, it has historically been limited in one fundamental way: dbt only understands SQL statements only as a series of strings.
Today, that changes.
We anticipate bringing the full suite of SDF’s static analysis capabilities, speed, and scalability into the dbt ecosystem. For more, checkout Tristan’s blog post here.
1 + 1 >> 2
The SDF team is, above all, impact-driven. Our plan now is to magnify and accelerate the reach of SDF’s technology through core improvements to the dbt engine, authoring layer, and rich ecosystem of libraries to accelerate more teams, more quickly than would otherwise be possible.
In data engineering circles, it goes almost without saying that dbt is the standard bearer for data transformation. It is the dominant choice for data teams worldwide and drives a significant percentage of global data workloads. That means that any improvements, new packages, and core technological developments in dbt can significantly shape the data engineering landscape as a whole.
We start today.
Our Mission Then, Our Mission Now
One of the very first diagrams I put together for SDF was a breakdown of the inner loop of data development. I believe that slide is still as relevant today (over two years on) as it was then and if you look closely, you’ll see that steps in this diagram map perfectly to the left half of the Analytics Development Life Cycle (ADLC) popularized by Tristan & dbt earlier this year.
My point is this: both dbt Labs and SDF Labs have been working towards the same vision, to bring software engineering principles and toolchains to SQL development. We now have the immense opportunity join our frameworks and unify our vision.
I’m Using SDF Today - What Happens?
While we’re excited to continue our SDF innovation, the core effort will be to integrate our capabilities into dbt. Our documentation will remain live for some period of time but our slack and site will migrate.
If you’re using SDF today, we’d love for you to be a part of that journey and among the first to pilot our advancements inside dbt. Please reach out to an SDF team member in the dbt community slack channel with any questions you may have.
Thank You
SDF has been shaped by countless extraordinary people but I want to spend a minute here to thank some really special folks. Without them, none of this would be possible. SDF would not exist. In no particular order:
Thank you Andrea Funsten and the fantastic partnership at RTP, your encouragement and expertise have helped us navigate even the most challenging moments. To Villi Iltchev, your mentorship and strategic insights have been crucial to our success. It’s been an honor to learn from you. To Vin Sachidananda for your optimism and constant support. To Andrew Peterson and Jane Tran, thank you for listening and reflecting on even our most mundane challenges. To Benn Stancil and Nick Schrock, for your probing questions and big ideas. Bob Muglia, your wisdom and leadership have inspired us to think big and challenge the status quo. To Jordan Ostroff, for showing us the true meaning of “business value”. To Aviel Ginsburg, for your steadfast belief in us from day 1. To our wonderful customers and early adopters, thank you for believing in our innovation.
Most of all to the SDF team, thank you for your humor and humility, creativity and curiosity, empathy and energy. It’s been one of the great joys of my life to have had the opportunity to get to know you and learn from you over the last years. That chapter is closing, but we’re turning the page onto something even brighter, bolder, and more exciting.
Happy 2025! It’s going to be a wonderful year.
- Lukas
So what happens to the open source code base?
Congrats!