Announced on 17 September alongside dbt State, Fivetran Context Layer, dbt Charts and a series of AI Wizard experiences, the releases extend the company's Open Data Infrastructure vision: a vendor-neutral architecture in which organisations independently manage each layer of their data stack, from storage and movement through transformation and visualisation.
dbt v2 is a complete Rust rewrite of the transformation engine. Where the previous Python implementation parsed a 10,000-model project at one speed, v2 does it up to ten times faster and returns real-time feedback on errors, column checks and lineage before execution begins. Both v1 and v2 remain Apache 2.0-licensed. The related dbt State feature removes unnecessary warehouse compute by inspecting warehouse metadata and model SQL to decide, per model, whether to build, skip, clone or defer on each run.
Gordon Curzon, Head of Analytics Engineering at Virgin Media O2, said dbt State had cut job run time and BigQuery compute costs by 25%. "dbt State has been a paradigm shift for how we work. With freshness codified, simpler orchestration, and freed-up developer capacity, we focus more time on initiatives that add value to our business."
The Fivetran Context Layer, currently in Private Beta, addresses the grounding problem for AI agents. LLMs working on data questions are only as reliable as the context they can access. The new service unifies structured metadata from dbt projects with unstructured knowledge from documentation and conversation threads, storing everything in the data warehouse using Agents Schema, an open-source standard. Integrations cover AI marketplaces including Anthropic and a ChatGPT plugin.
Alongside that, dbt Charts brings governed business intelligence definitions into the dbt project itself, version-controlled as YAML alongside the models they reference, so both engineers and AI agents read from the same source. dbt Wizard, the project-aware coding agent, extends from the dbt platform into a CLI and a desktop application.
"Every model our customers have built, every test they've written, every metric they've defined already captures the context AI agents need to do meaningful work," said Anjan Kundavaram, Chief Product Officer. "What we're delivering now is the open infrastructure to put that context to work across systems, while giving organisations the freedom to choose how their data is stored, moved, transformed and used as AI evolves."
Customer figures in the release included RxBenefits reporting a 59% cut in warehouse costs on scheduled jobs, saving over $8,000 in the first 60 days after deploying dbt State on Snowflake. More than 100,000 data teams globally use dbt, and Fivetran counts OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer and Verizon among its enterprise customers.
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