Big data company dbt Labs buys SDF Labs to improve SQL code comprehension

Big data engineering company dbt Labs Inc. today announced it’s buying SDF Labs Inc. in a merger of acronymic startups that promises to deliver improved data velocity and quality for their customers.

Philadelphia-based dbt Labs is the creator of a cloud-based data transformation tool, which can be used by companies to alter data and make it easier to process and analyze. It’s a comprehensive data platform that does everything from consolidating multiple spreadsheets into a single file, filtering inaccuracies in a dataset, and changing the way data is formatted across multiple database systems.

The company pitches dbt Cloud as a kind of “data control plane” that’s designed to assist with every stage of the analytics development lifecycle. It’s compatible with various data warehouse platforms, including Snowflake, Databricks and Google BigQuery.

As for SDF Labs, it’s a fresh-faced startup that only launched in June 2024, having created a framework designed to address the challenges of compiling and understanding Structured Query Language that can be used with any platform. The company’s technology is built with the Rust programming language and it’s already natively integrated with dbt, enabling the instant validation of SQL code the moment it’s written.

Dbt Labs founder and Chief Executve Tristan Handy said in a blog post that it’s a handy acquisition that brings native SQL comprehension capabilities to his company’s platform, and will help to “supercharge developer productivity” and improve overall data quality.

By providing real-time feedback on SQL code as it’s being written, SDF Labs helps developers to adopt new technologies such as code completion and content assist, and identify errors and ensure data quality much earlier in the development process. According to the startup, this helps to increase data velocity and improve its quality, making data analytics workloads much more efficient.

Another benefit of SQL comprehension is that it adds a new layer of extremely detailed metadata to dbt Labs’ table- and column-lineage, enhancing data classification to support more nuanced governance, the companies say. All of these capabilities will now be available natively within dbt Cloud.

“SDF’s technology will bring a massive upgrade to the heart of dbt and the dbt user experience,” Handy said. “This isn’t an incremental improvement to dbt; it’s a step-function change.”

Doug Henschen of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that SDF Labs is an ideal acquisition for dbt Labs. He said its multi-dialect SQL compiler, transformation framework and analytical database engine is packaged into a single command line interface that’s already well-integrated with dbt’s toolset.

“It helps SQL-centric types, which account for pretty much all of dbt’s users, identify and prevent SQL errors and improve and streamline the testing, governance and reporting around SQL workloads,” Henschen explained. “Overall, dbt Labs keeps gathering steam and this acquisition will improve the overall user experience of its platform much faster than it could have done through its own, organic development.”

SDF Labs’ technology will also help to improve dbt Labs’ other products, such as dbt Mesh, which allows data workloads to be coordinated across multiple platforms, and the new dbt Copilot, which is a generative artificial intelligence-powered assistant that can help to auto-generate tests, documentation, semantic models and more.

Its entire team will join dbt Labs as part of the acquisition, including its CEO Lukas Schulte. “Bringing SDF and dbt together is going to completely transform the dbt user experience with unprecedented levels of speed, accuracy and velocity,” Schulte said.

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