Comment by pawelduda

Comment by pawelduda 7 hours ago

11 replies

Thoughts on possible implications for users in foreseeable future? We built a lot using dbt and can't really think of going back or switching to alternatives

rockostrich 6 hours ago

Fivetran isn't really much of a transformation layer so this is likely just a move to lock-in customers of both companies by upselling an ingestion/transformation layer to existing customers.

The bigger question mark to me is that Fivetran recently acquired Tobiko, the company behind a dbt competitor SQLMesh. The Tobiko team said their focus has been on dbt-compatibility because a lot of Fivetran customers use dbt for their transformation layer. I fear it may have just been a way to get rid of competition leading up to this deal. I can't imagine Fivetran spent a ton of money just to have 2 products that do very similar things.

We use both open-source SQLMesh as well as their cloud offering Tobiko Cloud. Following the acquisition, we were annoyed that focus was going to go to dbt compatibility because there was a bunch of stuff on their roadmap that would help us that was now deprioritized. Thankfully, they still offer great support to us and delivered a few features that have given us some quality of life improvements. With this announcement, I'm worried we're going to end up being forced to migrate to dbt...

hisnameisjimmy 3 hours ago

Full disclosure: I am a PM at Fivetran who is very excited about this.

We are fully committed to open source dbt and don't want to build a 'walled garden'. Interoperability is one of the key value propositions of both Fivetran and dbt. While I'm biased, I think the main implications for users is that their favorite tooling will be with one vendor who cares about what makes them great.

You can read a bit more here: https://www.fivetran.com/blog/the-era-of-open-data-infrastru...

Kiro 7 hours ago

What's the lock-in?

  • 0cf8612b2e1e 6 hours ago

    The cloud component is probably sticky if you have come to rely on those parts.

  • globular-toast 6 hours ago

    I'm wondering too. We run dbt on-prem. Worst that could happen is we don't get any more free updates. But we have the software and it will continue to run.

    • hn1986 6 hours ago

      the concern is that dbt-core will become stagnant.

      • mjirv 6 hours ago

        It basically already has since they started developing dbt Fusion, so in that respect this probably doesn’t change much.

        I expect they’ll keep developing Fusion but possibly as even more of a commercial-only offering than it already was.

      • globular-toast 6 hours ago

        What's the problem specifically? Are you banking on some future features? Can't fix the bugs yourself? Worried it won't be compatible with future data warehouses?

        I know people don't like it these days, but you can just continue to run old software.

        • vovavili 3 hours ago

          dbt in particular is effectively useless without maintained and up-to-date connectors to your particular database.