dbt core sunset, Hex+Clickhouse Series C, DuckLake. It's conference season baby #86 w/e 30 May 2025
Join the 5,400-strong data herd getting all you need to know about Data for your Friday roundup
It’s conference season which means all the wild stuff gets announced now. So strap on in and prepare for massive news.
dbt core sunset?
I quote Christophe:
Among everything they have a new website, showcasing some kind of a new brand with a fresh identity. Here what they announced:
— A MCP server
— dbt Canvas, the drag and drop visual experience to write transformation like Alteryx other dinosaurs, tbh I get allergies seeing this kind of UIs. Real quesiton, what is the rational for this at the era of LLMs / codegen?
— dbt Insights, do explorative data analysis directly from the Cloud UI, stepping on BI toes
— Rebranded the dbt Explorer the dbt Catalog, matches what Coalesce did with Castordoc acquisition
— Costs management to save all the $$ you spent on having too many models
— dbt Fusion engine and a VS Code extension using this engine, the rewriting of SDF, using Rust, it supports Snowflake on MacOS for the moment, under Elastic Licence 2.0 (so other providers can't distribute it) and a mix of sources available and proprietary. Bittersweet.
Except for the first point, all others points are mainly to drive conversion and adoption of dbt Cloud (I know for Fusion it's a bit different but you will have to read my opinion on this later). The cloud offering starts to become a solid offering especially for very large enterprises.
Do you think dbt-core is being sunset? See a reddit discussion here
Massive Series C Rounds
Hex quietly raised a big Series C. Clickhouse raised $350m. Wait what? Yeah exactly. If you’re not paying attention you really should be.
DuckLake
A new table format and catalog noone really asked for but pretty cool stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataengineering/comments/1kwnx2o/ducklake_a_new_datalake_format_from_duckdb/
Orchestra Supports Gitlab
You can now
Back your pipelines in Gitlab
Run python code living in Gitlab
Run dbt-core code living in Gitlab
Sync to GitLab even if you are on a self-hosted GitLab and if you use Groups/Sub-Groups for access
Pretty neat. Check out the docs here
Medium ðŸ§
🧠Forecasting Cloud Costs to Drive Business Outcomes (link)
🧠From Data to Stories: Code Agents for KPI Narratives (link)
🧠What Salesforce’ Informatica acquisition means for the Data Industry (link)
🧠100 Days of Machine Learning Day 11: Statistics vs Probability (link)
🧠I Transitioned from Data Science to AI Engineering: Here’s Everything You Need to Know (link)
LinkedIn🕴
🕴 Unlocking the Future: What Is an Agentic Data Team? (link)
🕴 Snowflake Gen2 Crushes Databricks: 94% Faster, 66–83% Cheaper in BI (link)
🕴 Your Ultimate Guide to Snowflake Summit 2024: Events, Maps & Meetups (link)
🕴 Snowflake Beats Databricks: 58% Faster, 28% Cheaper (link)
🕴 Navigating Change: A Conversation on Change Management with Gaëlle Seret (link)
🕴 Exploring Knowledge Infrastructure and AI with Chris Tabb on the Data Value Show (link)
News 📰
Editor’s Pick
📰 Clickhouse Announce $350m Series C (link)
📰 Duckdb Announce DuckLake (link)
📰 Hex announce their Series C (Link)
📰 7Rivers Achieves Snowflake Financial Services Industry Competency (link)
📰 Volteras Raises $11.1 Million Series A to Transform Energy and Mobility Data (link)
📰 Databricks continues M&A spree, will buy Neon for $1 billion in AI-agent push (link)
YouTube and Podcast 🎥
Editor’s Pick
🎥 Real-Time Analytics using Confluent's Tableflow and Dremio (link)
🎥 Getting Started with Dremio's Enterprise Catalog Powered by Polaris (link)
🎥 Power BI Text Slicer Fusion: DAX Trick to Unite Two Filters (link)
Special 💫
💫 Data Engineering Weekly #221 (link)
Jobs 💼
💼 Senior Data Engineer at Chamber (link)
💼 Tech Lead, Data at Zensurance (link)
💼 Business Intelligence Data Engineer at TomoCredit (link)
💼 Lead Analytics Engineer at Chief Detective (link)
💼 PT Data Engineer at Marcel Digital (link)
Want to save on your ingestion bills? You’ll love this
You can leverage Python for lightweight ELT integrations. Here you’re only paying for compute and not being penalised by row-based pricing models. Pretty neat right? Check it out below / head to Orchestra and start today.
The best place to run dbt?
Don’t believe us? Watch the video below.
dbt, dbt core and dbt labs are all trademarks of dbt labs inc