The Adoption of dbt: From Silicon Valley to Bill in Ohio
- Kristin Keohan
- Oct 8, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: Oct 9, 2024
Last week I attended the Data Engineering & Machine Learning Summit. Amidst the technical questions, one comment made me pause.
“I get that dbt is all the buzz in Silicon Valley, but I live in Ohio, and no one is talking about it here.”
It got me thinking: where does dbt sit on the product adoption curve?
Dbt launched in 2016, developed by Fishtown Analytics (now dbt Labs) to make SQL-based data transformations more accessible. By 2022, dbt was already valued as a billion-dollar powerhouse, transforming data stacks with simplicity and efficiency. Databricks' 2023 State of Data & AI report even spotlighted it as the fastest-growing data product with an impressive 206% year-over-year customer increase.
And I was one of them. My team in D.C. adopted dbt in 2022, trading in a tangled mess of custom scripts in our Redshift instance for dbt's cleaner, faster, and more reliable data processing. The result? Our nightly ETL ran in an eighth of the time, and we could cleanly trace data back to its raw source with no headaches.
But then, what about Bill in Ohio?
Perhaps he represents the “early majority” adopters, while the coasts and tech hubs are buzzing in the “early adopter” phase?
I dug into the data.
Bill was right. Silicon Valley sat at the top, with Austin, Denver, Boston, Seattle, and New York trailing closely behind. And Ohio? A humble 27th of the 50 states in search interest.
This paints an interesting picture of dbt’s adoption curve, suggesting that as it continues to sweep the coasts, it’s only a matter of time before Bill in Ohio—and beyond—joins in the dbt transformation.
It’s not surprising that tech hubs tend to be early adopters of tools like dbt. Do you think it’s more due to a lack of awareness for “Bill from Ohio”, or his risk aversion? Some companies might wait for a technology to become more tested and widely adopted before committing to changing their tech stack. How likely do you think it is for a better and cheaper competitor to challenge dbt and similar tools? I don’t use it, and my company still has Redshift for our SQL database.