dbt Coalesce 2025 Highlights: dbt + Fivetran Merger, Open Data Infrastructure, dbt Fusion and MCP Server

Coalesce 2025 in Las Vegas highlighted a significant merger between dbt and Fivetran, and introduced the dbt Fusion engine, signaling a shift towards open data infrastructure and AI-ready analytics. The merger aims to bring ingestion, transformation, and metadata closer together without locking users into a single compute engine, while emphasizing open standards and compatibility across various tools. dbt Fusion, rewritten in Rust, acts as a SQL compiler that optimizes workflows by understanding warehouse dialects and providing real-time feedback, resulting in improved efficiency and reduced costs. AI-ready analytics were emphasized through the dbt MCP server, which facilitates a governed bridge for models and tools, and MetricFlow's open-source return under Apache 2.0, ensuring reliable metrics across platforms. The keynote underscored the importance of reliable metadata and agent-driven workflows to enhance throughput and confidence, suggesting starting with dbt Fusion on small projects and implementing CI diffs and impact analysis to improve workflow efficiency and reliability.