 So welcome back to the cube. I'm here with Luis Maldonado, who's the VP of product for DBT Labs, you know, almost recently joined, but over a year now, right? No, just joined actually three months ago, just cross three months really new. Yeah, that is new. You got to be drinking from the fire hose, getting it. I mean, both of us having been at Amazon and other startups and things like that. How has the velocity and getting to understand where the customers are coming from and getting an understanding of what's going on and what you're building even when you get there? Well, funny part is coming from Amazon, I actually got an insight into what was happening on DBT. Lot of customers are already using DBT and Athena, which is where I was leading a product there. And so I saw this phenomenal growth and I said, What are they doing? I've got to I've got to understand this. So started tracking them probably for a couple of years and and really started to figure out how can we work better together that ultimately led to a different situation. I decided to join the company, which has been phenomenal as well. So yeah, three months in, it's been a blast learning our business, learning the customers, learning how we're helping each other and coming to an event like today, seeing thousands of people so passionate about the product. It just I know I made the right decision. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, I mean, I got to say the energy at Coalesce and we're here at DBT Labs Coalesce in San Diego. And the energy has been fantastic. I was walking around even I mean, there's very rare when you get to a place and it's eight o'clock in the morning. And people are just jazzed up for what's going to be announced and trying to you know, the line to get into the keynotes was crazy even before I just loved it. What do you think was the, you know, the takeaway that you have from the keynotes that because there was so much announced and you guys are working on so many different things. What was what are the top takeaways that you? Yeah, well, we're hoping we landed the message around complexity and how we're helping people. That's certainly the thing that I've been seeing from the outside, even before DBT seeing how all the these you know, pipelines and tools and people building data products, all this work ends up being really complex, especially as they're they're successful. So we try to nail that message down and say, look, you've got to think about this early, you need to plan for it early and we're helping you. And so I'm hoping that landed well. We made a number of announcements telling people here's the types of tools, the experiences that you can use to get you get you on your journey. But but that that message of complexity, I hope it resonates, I certainly has as I've been speaking with customers. They many of them said, you know, we had fifth, third spank up on the stage with me. They're like, I would love to have them just be in my in my company, come talk to my executives, because that's exactly the path we're going through. So so yeah, those are key things. And obviously, we had a number of product announcements that we're hoping landed well as well. Lots of excitement around our Explorer product. People really got, you know, jazzed about that. Even something like our cloud based CLI. It was applause and excitement to boy, these are the passionate people. I was going to say, I know we just had Tristan on and he and I both looked at that as being just huge because I mean, that's where the core the people using dbt core, that's where they live. They live in the CLI. I also think the mesh, the dbt mesh is a huge announcement as well. And I think that again, the little demo that you went through and I took some pictures of that and actually tweeted them out and did a little tweak thing. Storm about that. I think that if it's called or an X doubt, I don't know what the written proper terminology for that is anymore. Don't tweet anymore, do we? No, I guess not. So I, you know, we put them out into the ether there. And I think part of it is, you know, bringing things together. And I think the contracts and being able to understand where there's, you know, interactions with different models and using ref as that core for that, that to me seems like a huge advancement to your point about bringing simplicity. Absolutely. I think that's the idea is, you know, what what people have done to address some, you know, complexity has been let me let me jam it all together, right? Because at least I have control, at least I think I have control. But that's the monster that ends up building. And so letting go of control, it's hard. But you find that that creates much more simple ways for people to interact, let people you choose their own tools, build at their own pace. And that's I mean, that's the key. That was the beauty of the ref. It's a natural way. We already support this function for you to be able to do that within a project. Why not across projects. So came together really well. And it resonates so well with some of our other features, you mentioned some of the governance features. Now that you're starting to separate, now you have contracts, you have ways of working together that are agreed upon. So if we're going to if we're going to work separately, we're going to do that in ways that you know, we might be at different paces, we got to make sure we're synchronized. And those are all great concepts that work together. Yeah, I think that was one of the big keys that I came away from. And you know, we were lucky enough to see some of these announcements ahead of time. So, you know, I was quoted and some of the press about it. And I think when I look at it, it's really building that abstraction layer, and that semantic layer, and really focusing on how do you make it more accessible across all of these things. And you also announced, you know, the GA of the semantic layer, which I'm sure has, you know, garnered some very interesting comments from the ecosystem and from your customers. What have you been seeing? Yeah, no doubt. And by the way, thank you for that article. I saw your article, we put out on that. I really appreciate that. You know, what we're seeing from the semantic layer is it's been a building excitement. So, we launched it last year into preview, got a lot of excitement about where can people get involved? We had partners already signing up and making integrations. And that's what we leaned in, honestly. We went and acquired Transform to help us really drive this into a new, even better solution. The engine, the metric flow engine was phenomenal, by the way. And that's, we love that. So, that integration came together really well. But, you know, I would just say it's excitement, especially business analysts. You can now take the tool that they've been using and right within a very natural interface, pull in these metrics and pull in all that work that the DBT community has been building for their analysts. It's like nothing. It's like an easy drop and drag and drop for them. They don't even have to worry about it. So, it's just a great combination. I think it's a really nice way within an organization to see that sharing from the data team out to the consumer and business teams without a ton of work and hard kind of lifting in order to keep those contracts that we were talking about. Business people don't have to worry about it. Yeah. I think, again, being that you're heading up product, it's a very different role here than it was at our former employer. But, I think when you're looking at it and beyond just the features, I think I liked how you broke it down. Hey, we announced 49 new features, including support for materialized views, which is super exciting to a lot of people who are using them and trying to use them in a proper way, where they're, again, making sure that they're updated properly and not breaking and things of that nature or being able to deprecate them and stuff of that nature. But, there's also the other two that you talked about, the fixes and some of the things that are under the hood there. To me, again, as a product guy, I geeked out on the other two as much. I'm like, don't get me wrong. I love new features, new shiny features that help you sell more. But, I think you're bread and butter. You have to feed that as well. Absolutely. Yeah, we're excited. I mean, we're going to continue to make sure we're investing in core product. So, that's just what you can see when we put these releases out. We did a 1.0.6 in July, followed up release after release, and you look at it and you're like, there's a lot of great work there. So, I think that's honestly why our community gets so excited. We're investing, they're investing. We actually have more contributions coming through all the time from our community. So, it's not even just us anymore. So, that work is just that's what builds this community. It's what builds the structure. And then, it makes it so much easier for us to say, well, how are you bringing that value to the rest of your organization and all these other pieces just fall into place? So, from that, about what percentage, I guess, you brought it up. So, we'll go there. What percentage is DBT provided versus community provided? Yeah. Well, right now, it's primarily us, I'll be honest, but what we're seeing is a lot more people getting involved. So, we track, we have some of the community members that are involved in a number of different projects. We're trying to encourage more and more. So, we actually give them the kudos. We're making sure that they're involved. But, I don't know, we're doing the best we can and continuing to have more and more people join. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, building community is hard. Keeping them going is hard. I think, but again, you have such a loyal base of users of the product that are doing things that probably didn't even, you know, people didn't even think about doing. In fact, I was at a DBT user group meeting in Boston most pretty recently, actually two weeks ago, I think. And I think part of it was that they were looking at the community and the ecosystem around there was also coming up with ideas and new ways to use DBT. Is that where you take some of the inspiration for what you're building not only into core but into cloud? Yeah, yeah, there's some great packages that the community has been building. We see them coming up all the time. Today I announced, you know, we're making native integrations for things like SQL Fluff and SQL FMT. So just being able to see what's important to the community. They're building these packages saying we think this is valuable and absolutely, let's see how we can make sure that they integrate. So definitely taking a cue from them and as you can see when we're bringing things out back to their community, we say, what do you think of this? We'll try that out. We'll actually go put that out in some betas even in the core products and work together to say this might be experimental. So help us find out does this work for you and if not let's make sure we're revving it. Yeah, I think going even that way and I think you had a chart up of all the data warehouses and data lakes that you're doing integrations with as well and I think you know the AWS is, the Google's, the Databricks, Snowflake. I forgot somebody in there. There's one other on that thing. Starburst is in there. Starburst as well, you know with the Trino and Starburst. Then you also have Microsoft Azure now getting it to the into the fold as well and that's in private preview I think is what it is. That's right. That's going to be available soon. Microsoft is a huge huge player for our enterprise customers. So this is really important there. We're excited to bring that out. These are both great products. A fabric product is pretty new on the Microsoft side. Azure analytics, obviously this has been established but our companies are really excited, especially those that are really, you know, Microsoft shops. So great to see that expanding platform set. You know, we've got a number of community connectors that we're still watching to see. Are there others? My former company, Athena, you know, is one that we're watching kind of like Starburst. So we try to see which ones are most important to our customers and making sure that we've got that choice for everybody. Yeah, I think that's the key is that it's people want to be able to build their modern data platforms and modern data stack in a certain way. How do you see, you know, with your view as heading a product, how DBT cloud is going to play in the modern data stack, safe for just the next year? Yeah. Well, I think what we're seeing is a lot of these features that we're driving now are naturally going to start feeding and connecting into more of the enterprise. So something like a semantic layer. You can see all the integrations, all the analytics tools, BI tools, you can see how that's going to keep extending us and making us useful in different ways for the business users. We're also putting out all these APIs, not only just on the semantic layer, but just APIs that you can use and make sure that you're integrating and building with other products that you might be seeing. So we see many different combinations that people are seeing, not just for building and transformation, but creating data products. So whether that's metrics that you want to expose, whether it's full on data mesh style, like projects that provide the base for some tables and things that are in your warehouse, lots of ways that you can see us extending out. So it's not just about transformation, it really is about how do you look at the full process of building and working with your data products? Yeah, I think that was the key that I took away from a lot of the announcements was it's becoming that DBT is moving into being the connective tissue between a lot of these different pieces of the modern data stack and really because you sit at that transformation layer, you have visibility and can provide visibility into the data observability products that are out there, the data governance products. Is that how you see your ecosystem evolving as well? Oh, definitely. So people love our dag, right, our graph here. And that's honestly probably one of the biggest assets for our partners and others that say, how can we also get information from that? So all the dynamic information that we collect, your execution times, your runs, these statistics, that's really valuable to someone who's trying to build in and understand their full data practice. So we've got a discovery API on which the Explorer has been built. We're encouraging people to integrate with that. We believe our partners would love to use some aspects of that. We've got some things in the works that you'll be seeing over time as well there. But I think that's a great way to look at is that that information that we collect since we are at the center, the transformation center, we're able to give you a really great perspective of what is happening to your data in terms of lineage, in terms of how it's being built, its quality, and that makes for great data products all around you. Yeah, I'm a huge proponent of that. You know, looking at building data features and data products and again going back to the lineage and understanding where is that data coming from. And a lot of what you're doing with Explorer and Mesh and a number of the other announcements that you had here really feeds into making that real. And I think again it's beyond just data contracts and things like that is Tristan and I were actually reminiscing about because that was the big news a year ago was all about data contracts. And I think that's just a small piece that SLA between you like you said finance and marketing or something like that. You know, year from now we're sitting actually in Vegas. I just heard that. So very exciting. Unfortunate because we have a beautiful view and I'll get some B roll film of that. But I think that really when you start to look out into your in your crystal ball you have a lot of stuff. You know, like you said, I like the three pillars and how you broke it down. What do you think are sitting here next year? What are we going to be talking about? Just big theme theme wise. Yeah. Well, we're just getting started with Mesh. So I expect we're going to hear that theme continue. Big theme I would hope next year is you're going to see more and more people saying this is how I built it. This is what I did with it. So we've put out a number of features to support that but we think there's a lot more that goes involved. I hinted at a couple of things around how we can help you orchestrate and bring some of those elements together. So I would see, you know, kind of a much more evolved Mesh story next year. As part of that, I think I hinted a little bit about the the DAG. That is a key element for us. And so explore is one of the first experiences that you're really starting to see how we're able to take that information, really make it visible and understand. You're probably going to see us talk about a number of products in that area as well. That's super exciting. Louise, I really appreciate you coming on. You're actually a CUBE alumnus anyways. You've been on before. It's been a minute since I've seen Dave and the team but yeah, it's exciting. Well, we'll have to get you back on again. And I think we really appreciate you having us out at DBT coalesce. And I think this has been a lot really exciting. Really excited for you to be watching. Thank you for watching the CUBE or the CUBE and we're the leader in enterprise tech analysis and information. Stay tuned. More to come.