E151: Taking on DBT by Combining Data Transformation with a Query Engine

Lukas Schulte is Co-Founder and CEO of SDF Labs (Semantic Data Fabric), the data transformation layer and query engine platform. They're an open core company powered by the Apache Data Fusion query engine. SDF Labs has raised $9M from investors including RTP Global and Two Sigma Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the complications and pain points with the Modern Data Stack, shifting left with data (ie. moving more over to the client), competing with DBT by adding a query engine, why building in Rust was important, why their CLI is closed source, the importance of a strong partner strategy as a data company & more!