About the dbt Fusion engine beta
dbt is the industry standard for data transformation. The dbt Fusion engine enables dbt to operate at speed and scale like never before.
The dbt Fusion engine is currently in beta and the related documentation is a work in progress. The information on this page will evolve as features are added and enhanced. Join the conversation in our Community Slack channel #dbt-fusion-engine.
The dbt Fusion engine shares the same familiar framework for authoring data transformations as dbt Core, while enabling data developers to work faster and deploy transformation workloads more efficiently.
What is Fusion
Fusion is an entirely new piece of software, written in a different programming language (Rust) than dbt Core (Python). Fusion is significantly faster than dbt Core, and it has a native understanding of SQL across multiple engine dialects. Fusion will eventually support the full dbt Core framework, a superset of dbt Core’s capabilities, and the vast majority of existing dbt projects.
Fusion contains mixture of source-available, proprietary, and open source code. That means:
- dbt Labs publishes much of the source code in the
dbt-fusionrepository, where you can read the code and participate in community discussions. - Some Fusion capabilities are exclusively available for paying customers of the cloud-based dbt platform. Refer to supported features for more information.
Read more about the licensing for the dbt Fusion engine here.
Why use Fusion
As a developer, Fusion can:
- Immediately catch incorrect SQL in your dbt models
- Preview inline CTEs for faster debugging
- Trace model and column definitions across your dbt project
All of that and more is available in the dbt extension for VSCode, with Fusion at the foundation.
Fusion also enables more-efficient deployments of large DAGs. By tracking which columns are used where, and which source tables have fresh data, Fusion can ensure that models are rebuilt only when they need to process new data. This "state-aware orchestration" is a feature of the dbt platform.
How to use Fusion
You can:
- Select Fusion from the dropdown/toggle in the dbt platform
- Install the dbt extension for VSCode
- Install the Fusion CLI
Go straight to the Quickstart to feel the Fusion as fast as possible.
What's next?
dbt Labs launched the dbt Fusion engine as a public beta on May 28, 2025, with plans to reach full feature parity with dbt Core ahead of Fusion's general availability.
More information about Fusion
Fusion marks a significant update to dbt. While many of the workflows you've grown accustomed to remain unchanged, there are a lot of new ideas, and a lot of old ones going away. The following is a list of the full scope of our current release of the Fusion engine, including implementation, installation, deprecations, and limitations: