What Open Data Infrastructure looks like with dbt Mesh

At dbt Summit 2026, Fivetran’s Jack Lowery and dbt Labs’ Anna Lee demonstrated Open Data Infrastructure, a model in which data is stored in open formats such as Apache Iceberg so that multiple compute engines can access it without proprietary warehouse lock-in. They highlighted dbt’s catalogs.yml v2 specification, which separates Iceberg table location and catalog configuration from the warehouse performing writes, enabling more flexible cross-platform data management. A live dbt Mesh demonstration showed platform, finance, and marketing teams using Snowflake and Databricks to write and read shared Iceberg tables through catalog federation without duplicating underlying data. The session also introduced Fivetran’s Managed Data Lake, which writes Iceberg or Delta Lake metadata to customer-owned cloud storage using Polaris, and Lake Compute, a private-beta DuckDB-based option that can run individual dbt models on lower-cost compute while the rest of a project remains on another platform.

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