dbt-core 1.12 cleans house while ClickHouse builds bridges

dbt-core's 1.12 release candidates tighten the platform

The two dbt-core release candidates this week send a clear signal about the project's direction. dbt-core 1.12.0-rc1 removes the experimental dbt login command and the bundled dbt-state plugin, along with the associated --manage-state flags and DBT_ENGINE_STATE_* environment variables. This cleanup, which reverts earlier PRs, suggests the team is consolidating state management around dbt Fusion rather than the now-removed bundled plugin. The release also fixes a non-deterministic parsing error that could intermittently break unit tests on versioned models — a welcome stability fix for anyone who has hit that flaky CI failure.

Days later, dbt-core 1.12.0-rc2 makes flags introduced in dbt-core 1.9 and 1.10 default to true, effectively turning experimental behaviors into the standard path. For teams still running older configs, this is a compatibility heads-up. The RC also adds a catalog_database field to CatalogWriteIntegrationConfig, letting catalogs.yml override the database name for any catalog type — a feature that pairs with the adapter's get_catalog_database_override method. A separate fix for "ghost-duplicate" partial parsing errors and a cosmetic fix for unrendered config kwarg displays round out the release.

For those following the alpha track, dbt-core 2.0.0-alpha.4 landed with DuckDB gaining read-write access to Iceberg REST and Unity catalogs via catalog-aware materializations. More importantly for day-to-day users, the alpha fixes a significant bug in the state:modified selector that was incorrectly flagging seeds, snapshots, and data tests when their configs used environment-aware Jinja expressions — a correction that will prevent false positives in multi-environment CI pipelines.

ClickHouse builds bridges to Postgres and beyond

ClickHouse had a prolific week across the blog, starting with pg_re2, a Postgres extension that replaces POSIX regex with RE2-powered functions. The performance numbers are striking: 1.8× to 8.6× speedups on regex operations and 1.1× to 1.8× on indexed queries. More critically for ClickHouse users, the extension solves syntax incompatibilities between Postgres POSIX regex and ClickHouse's RE2, enabling correct pushdown of regex expressions in the pg_clickhouse foreign data wrapper. If you're using Postgres as a query front-end to ClickHouse, this is a meaningful upgrade.

The company also announced its official ADBC driver, positioning it as a modern, Arrow-native alternative to ODBC and JDBC. The key architectural claim is zero-conversion, end-to-end columnar data movement: results leave ClickHouse as Apache Arrow and arrive in the application as Arrow, eliminating the row-oriented round trip. For teams working in languages without an official ClickHouse client — Ruby, R, or C — the single Rust-built driver opens a new path.

On the operational side, ClickHouse on Docker Hardened Images are now available, shipping stripped-down, security-hardened builds of the server, Keeper, Kubernetes Operator, and metrics exporter. These are designed to pass enterprise security scans by shipping only what each component needs to run.

Two blog posts round out the week: a guide to AI data stacks using Postgres and ClickHouse and a piece on using chDB as a local data engine for AI agents, covering use cases like agent memory with MergeTree and vector search, and chDB as a federation hub.

Branch-aware development reaches Tinybird Local

Tinybird improved its branch-based local development workflow this week. The CLI now picks the target workspace in Tinybird Local more predictably: by default, commands point to the workspace mapped to the current Git branch. Passing --token or setting TB_TOKEN overrides that detection, running the command against the token's workspace. Separately, sink jobs now run on the least-busy replica, a quality-of-life improvement for teams running production workloads.

A quick Dagster fix

Dagster 1.13.13 shipped a single bugfix worth noting: a fresh installation could resolve an incompatible version of grpcio-health-checking, breaking code server imports due to a protobuf version conflict. The release also fixes a UI error when viewing tick details for declarative automation runs and improves the asset launch dialog by auto-expanding the warnings section when alerts are present.