Hello 👋 We use both dbt CLI (for development) and dbt Cloud (mainly for production deployment, although we are open to using Dagster instead for production deployment). We want to use Dagster to orchestrate dbt, but don't know if we should go with the dbt integration or the dbt Cloud integration. Looks like we could use either one, right? Could you please help me understand the pros and cons?

Hi @Félix Tremblay ! currently , if you’re interested in using software-defined assets (which we generally recommend), only the dbt-core integration supports these APIs. However, within a few weeks there will be feature parity between these two integrations, so at that point I would say that there will be no particular difference between those two options (so if you have dbt Cloud set up already it’d probably be easiest to go that route)

Hi @owen, thank you for your help. Yes, SDAs are definitely something we are interested in! :daggy-love: Another aspect I want to consider is the Branch Deployment workflow. Our _dbt_project_ is in the same GitHub repository as our (currently empty) _dagster_project_. I am looking for a seamless branch deployment experience (e.g. you are adding a feature that touches both the dagster and the dbt assets: during the development, both dagster and dbt are operating in concert within the dev environment/target, then during deployment, both operate in concert within the prod environment/target). Do you think the minimal-effort development/deployment workflow I'm looking for is achievable? If you have any recommendations to help us get there, it would be greatly appreciated.

This guide: https://docs.dagster.io/guides/dagster/branch_deployments has a lot of relevant info here, but the short answer is that this is not too tricky to set up. Quick answer is that when you're configuring your dbt_cli_resource, you would do something like

dbt_target = "dev" if os.getenv("DAGSTER_CLOUD_IS_BRANCH_DEPLOYMENT") else "prod"

dbt_resource = dbt_cli_resource.configured({..., "target": dbt_target})

Thank you Owen

yep — we haven’t yet figured out all the details of how dbt Cloud assets + branch deployments will work but that is something we do plan on implementing

I'm curious if it will become possible to achieve the same with the dbt Cloud integration since you mentioned there would be feature parity in a few weeks

that’s definitely the goal but i mostly meant that there would be a SDA integration for dbt-cloud, wasn’t factoring in the branch deployment part into this (sorry for the confusion!)