dbt Fusion Engine

The dbt Fusion Engine shares the same familiar framework for authoring data transformations as dbt Core, while enabling data developers to work faster and deploy transformation workloads more efficiently. GitHub

It’s the new announcement based on the acquisition of SDF. So it’s dbt + SDF.

Currently Beta

The dbt Fusion engine is currently (2025-05-29) in beta and the related documentation is a work in progress. The information on this page will evolve as features are added and enhanced. Join the conversation in our Community Slack channel #dbt-fusion-engine.

Fusion is an entirely new piece of software, written in a different programming language (Rust) than dbt Core (Python). Fusion is significantly faster than dbt Core, and it has a native understanding of SQL across multiple engine dialects.

Fusion will eventually support the full dbt Core framework, a superset of dbt Core’s capabilities, and the vast majority of existing dbt projects.

Fusion contains mixture of source-available, proprietary, and open source code. That means:

• dbt Labs publishes much of the source code in the  dbt-fusion repository, where you can read the code and participate in community discussions.
• Some Fusion capabilities are exclusively available for paying customers of the cloud-based  dbt platform. Refer to  supported features for more information.

Read more about the licensing for the dbt Fusion engine  here.

Fusion includes source-available (ELv2), open-source (Apache 2), and proprietary components. You can use only the source-available code if you prefer.

As long as you aren’t offering Fusion as a hosted or managed service to a third party, you should think about using Fusion in almost exactly the same way you think about using dbt Core today.

You can use Fusion internally in your own business, for free and without restriction. This includes providing transformed data to other customers, as long as the transformed data is the product.

• more links: New code, new license: Understanding the new license for the dbt Fusion Engine | dbt Labs

• dbt Core is Apache 2 OSS forever, but dbt Fusion is the future
• dbt Fusion is a whole mix of different licenses, open source, source available, and proprietary
• The open source parts will be Elastic v2

Great points here by Matthew Mullins on Bsky:

Occurs to me that this probably also has downstream impact on independent orchestration tools, dagster et al, as dbt moves to get more users onto its cloud offering. No more rolling your own.
Elastic license on the new code will prevent any 3rd parties from running dbt fusion, so Paradime et al are locked to dbt core forever, but people rolling their own orchestration won’t be impacted.

My question: But would you consider running dbt fusion as part of an orchestrator, a “hosted service”? If so, it wouldn’t apply if you host yourself. But then it’s a problem for all cloud providers, indeed. Is “executing it” considered a hosted service 🤔

“You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service”
The elastic license is pretty straightforward; i think dbt would be able to enforce it against the Dagsters of the world if they want to. @mjirv.bsky.social on Bluesky

Origin: @jennajordan.me on Bluesky
References: SQLMesh
Created 2025-05-29