dbt-ibis

With dbt-ibis you can write your dbt models using Ibis.

This package is in very early development. Things might go wrong. Feedback and contributions are welcome!

Basic example

pip install dbt-ibis

You can write your Ibis model in files with the extension .ibis. Each .ibis file needs to correspond to one model which is defined as a model function returning an Ibis table expression:

stg_stores.ibis:

from dbt_ibis import depends_on, source


@depends_on(source("sources_db", "stores"))
def model(stores):
    return stores.mutate(store_id=stores["store_id"].cast("int"))

You can now reference the stg_stores model in either a normal SQL model using {{ ref('stg_stores') }} or in another Ibis model:

usa_stores.ibis:

from dbt_ibis import depends_on, ref


@depends_on(ref("stg_stores"))
def model(stores):
    return stores.filter(stores["country"] == "USA")

Whenever your Ibis model references either a source or a SQL model, you'll need to define the column data types as described in Model Contracts - getdbt.com. If you reference another Ibis model, this is not necessary. For more examples, including column data type definitions, see the demo project.

You can use all the dbt commands you're used to, you simply need to replace dbt with dbt-ibis. For example:

dbt-ibis run --select stg_stores+

You'll notice that for every .ibis file, dbt-ibis will generate a corresponding .sql file in a __ibis_sql subfolder. This is because dbt-ibis simply compiles all Ibis expressions to SQL and then let's DBT do its thing. You should not edit those files as they are overwritten every time you execute a dbt-ibis command. However, it might be interesting to look at them if you want to debug an expression.

Editor configuration

You might want to configure your editor to treat .ibis files as normal Python files. In VS Code, you can do this by putting the following into your settings.json file:

    "files.associations": {
        "*.ibis": "python"
    },

Limitations

• There is no database connection available in the Ibis model functions. Hence, you cannot use Ibis functions which would require this.
• It currently only works with duckdb. I'll soon add support for Snowflake and, if possible, all databases which are supported by both dbt and Ibis.

Integration with DBT

There are discussions on adding a plugin system to dbt which could be used to provide first-class support for other modeling languages such as Ibis (also see this PoC by dbt) or PRQL (see dbt-prql).

As this feature didn't make it onto the roadmap of dbt for 2023, I've decided to create dbt-ibis to bridge the time until then. Apart from the limitations mentioned above, I think this approach can scale reasonably well. However, the goal is to migrate to the official plugin system as soon as it's available.

Development

pip install -e '.[dev]'

Tests, linting, etc. will follow.