from Hacker News

Dbt Labs acquires SDF Labs

by karakanb on 1/14/25, 2:42 PM with 48 comments

• by sullivanmatt on 1/14/25, 10:28 PM

  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.

• by trickyager on 1/14/25, 4:42 PM

  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.

• by jmclnx on 1/14/25, 4:42 PM

  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 :)

• by 0cf8612b2e1e on 1/14/25, 4:40 PM

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

• by capital_guy on 1/14/25, 7:15 PM

  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

• by bcoates on 1/15/25, 4:36 AM

  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.

• by barrrrald on 1/14/25, 4:50 PM

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

• by hkt on 1/14/25, 5:40 PM

  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 :)

• by qeternity on 1/14/25, 4:27 PM

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

• by GoToRO on 1/14/25, 9:41 PM

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

• by nwhnwh on 1/15/25, 3:11 AM

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

• by dark-star on 1/14/25, 4:30 PM

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