September 2021 dbt Update: DAG in the IDE + Metadata API in GA

Hello there,

Do you remember? The 21st day of September? 🎶 Course you do it was two days ago. Well that's a win in your bucket and the day's barely begun! So let's get a win for someone else -- like Jeremy Cohen, the dbt Core product manager.

I'm sure you know that half of the updates in this email are pushed automatically when we upgrade everyone to the latest version of dbt Cloud 🚀

But did you know the other half requires you (or your account admin) to actively switch to the latest version of dbt Core? 😱 If this isn't happening regularly (how-to video here), you may miss out on major improvements to performance, stability, and speed.

Give Jeremy a win and check out the blog he just posted on why this matters even more leading up to 💥dbt v1.0💥. While we're throwing W's, don't forget to also register for his talk at Coalesce now!

What's New

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dbt v0.20.2

• Check out the #dbt-releases channel in the dbt Community Slack for full detail!
• More fixes for bugs, support for the latest Python version, and best-yet partial parsing for stable & speedy development

dbt v0.21.0-rc1

• Check out the #dbt-prereleases channel in the dbt Community Slack, and Jeremy's Discourse post!
• dbt build: Did you catch our teaser last month at Staging?
• Defining resource configs in all the places you'd expect (i.e. YAML files)
• Capture changes to macros in state:modified, for best-yet Slim CI

dbt Cloud v1.1.32 - v1.1.35: 

• Changelog and additional assets located here.*
• DAG in the IDE: We want users to have a frictionless experience when navigating between code and context. Embedding the DAG within the IDE makes investigating project structure a lot easier
• The Metadata API: Now in GA! Assess data health with the metadata generated by recent dbt job runs
• Dashboard Status Tiles: Embed this tile anywhere iFrames live to quickly check data freshness

New Resources 

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Things to Read 📚

• Have you subscribed to the Analytics Engineering Roundup? Tristan (dbt Labs Founder and CEO), and Anna (Director of Community) just started trading off Sunday sends, giving them both a little more time to go deep on a topic that's top of mind for Data Twitter everyone. Anna's latest reflection? Your Data PM is not a panacea.

Things to Listen To 🎧

• The latest episode of the Analytics Engineering podcast dropped this morning, and I'm literally listening as I type. The guest, Brittany Bennett, is talking about hiring for mission alignment over "technical" skill. I can even feel this over in Product Marketing, so I'm keen to parse the parallels! Also, if you think you'd do a better job at these emails (I don't doubt you could) you should join my team -- HMU.

• If you missed the previous episode of the pod, our friends at Hex joined Tristan and Julia to ask, "What if data team collaboration looked more like a GDoc than a Git workflow?" 😱 In the distance, I can be heard asking why marketing collaboration can't look more like a Powerpoint, but no one answers, because no one agrees.

Things to Experience ✨

• World-renowned podcast host and product manager, Julia Schottenstein, is speaking at the Open Source Data conference next week! She's joining an all-star panel of friends from Snowplow, Meltano, Elementl, and more.

• World-renowned aerial acrobat and solutions architect, Amy Chen, is leading a workshop at the Snowflake Build Summit next month! They'll share how to build a scalable data pipeline using dbt + Snowflake for financial reporting use cases.

Things to Observe 👀

• This photo of me on top of Mt Whitney after my solo SOBO of the JMT last month. This is both the reason why I'll never again eat oatmeal, and the reason you didn't get a newsletter in August. Sorry about that.

Hey, thanks for reading. I appreciate you.

Lauren Craigie
Director of Product Marketing, dbt Labs