Atlan Becomes dbt Semantic Layer Launch Partner and Announces Integration – Atlan

With column-level lineage and dbt metrics as a first-class citizen in Atlan, this partnership increases context, visibility, and self-service for diverse data teams.


Today we’re excited to announce our partnership with dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering. As part of this, joint customers will have access to an end-to-end governance framework for data models and metrics in the modern data stack.

dbt Labs’ new Semantic Layer enables organizations to centrally define key business metrics like “revenue,” “customer count,” or “churn rate” in dbt, and query them in downstream analytics tools. This allows everyone in the business to feel confident that they are working from the same assumptions as their colleagues, regardless of their data tooling of choice. If a metric definition is updated in dbt, it is seamlessly updated everywhere, ensuring consistency throughout the business.

Atlan’s integration with the dbt Semantic Layer brings dbt’s rich metrics into the rest of the data stack. With this integration, company metrics are now a part of column-level lineage, spanning from source systems and data storage to transformation and BI.

360° asset profile for a dbt Revenue metric in Atlan
dbt metrics are now a first-class citizen in Atlan, complete with their own 360° profile where you can assign owners, attach resources, verify metrics, see definitions, write context-rich READMEs, and more.

We’re excited to partner with dbt Labs to make metrics a first class citizen for data teams.

Metrics are the language through which the business understands data. For far too long, data teams have dealt with endless chaos about metrics definitions and accuracy.

Now, with Atlan and dbt, diverse data people can cut through the chaos and work together better with easier collaboration and alignment.

Varun Banka, Co-Founder at Atlan

Our native dbt Cloud integration ingests all dbt metrics and metadata about dbt models, merges it with metadata from all other tools in the data stack, creates column-level lineage from source to BI, and sends that unified context back into tools like Snowflake and the BI tools where people work daily.

With this, when questions arise about company data, data teams can quickly find the correct metric, backtrack through changes via version control, assess exactly what changed at every layer (i.e. the data, definition, and operational layers), and trace how downstream assets were affected. This powerful impact and root cause analysis finally gives modern data teams the tools they need for end-to-end data governance and change management at every stage of the data lifecycle.

Lineage graph in Atlan, featuring a dbt transformation and associated context
Go beyond tables and warehouses with end-to-end lineage, now with column-level visibility into all your dbt transformations.

The dbt Semantic Layer gives customers a central source of truth for their business-critical metrics, and the ability to query them from tools like Atlan.

Through this partnership between dbt Labs, Atlan, and other industry leaders, organizations will be able to benefit from unprecedented consistency and precision in their key metrics.

Margaret Francis, Chief Product Officer at dbt Labs

Here is how joint customers benefit from Atlan and dbt Labs’ partnership:

  • 360° metric profiles: Just like a data asset, every dbt metric is now a first-class citizen with a complete profile in Atlan. Data teams can find and verify metrics, assign owners, personalize access, attach documentation, track changes, find downstream assets, and more.
  • Metrics querying: With our Visual Query Builder, non-technical data users can now query dbt metrics — democratizing data and reducing dependencies on analytical and data engineers.
  • End-to-end, column-level data lineage: We use automated SQL parsing to create end-to-end, column-level lineage for all dbt transformations. This shows how each dbt model affects not just upstream warehouses but also downstream BI reports and dashboards.
  • Activating metric context into BI: With our Chrome extension, dbt metadata is now accessible in downstream BI tools like Looker and Tableau.
Atlan's Chrome extension makes context around a dbt Revenue metric available in a financial Tableau dashboard
Atlan’s Chrome extension brings dbt metadata to the places where you work every day. If you’re in a BI dashboard, no need to switch tools and go searching for context in dbt.

This new partnership and integration comes on the heels of our major launch, featuring a complete redesign and slate of brand-new features, integrations, and partnerships. We were also recently named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Catalogs for DataOps, Q2 2022.

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