dbt Labs is retiring the dbt Snowflake Native App — and it tells you a lot about where the data stack is heading.
The Native App was an experiment: bring dbt-powered AI capabilities directly inside Snowflake’s environment. It made sense at the time.
But the integration landscape has moved on, and a standalone app is no longer the right delivery vehicle.
The replacement: the dbt Semantic Layer, available natively in Snowflake today — no app required.
What changes (and what doesn’t):
- The Snowflake Native App enters maintenance mode now, full removal November 2026
- dbt Core, dbt platform, and the Semantic Layer are completely unaffected
- Governed metrics from dbt now flow directly into Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex
- Semantic Views replace what the Native App was trying to do — with a deeper integration
My honest take: Killing a product that hasn’t kept pace with the ecosystem takes discipline. The Snowflake Native App was a chatbot wrapper; the Semantic Layer feeding Snowflake Intelligence is a fundamentally better architecture. Not every vendor makes this call.
📚 Source: https://lnkd.in/dDEB72-M
P.S. Are you using the dbt Snowflake Native App today — or did you already move to the Semantic Layer? 👇
