We are so pleased to announce that phData has been named dbt Labs’ 2025 Partner of the Year!
We’re grateful for the recognition, proud of the outcomes we’re delivering for our clients, and truly energized to drive even more dbt success.
We’re also thrilled to share that we’ve achieved dbt’s new Visionary partner status, which according to dbt means,
“Achieving Visionary status affirms your leadership in delivering transformative data solutions and marks the highest level of recognition within our partner ecosystem.”
In this post, you’ll meet the experts behind our momentum, see the projects that set us apart, and get a taste of the recipe that has made phData a 3X dbt Partner of the Year.
What Makes phData a dbt Partner of the Year?
This is a tricky question to answer since there are so many people, events, project milestones, client outcomes, community engagements, and a million other things to attribute this award to. So we did what anyone does these days when looking for answers: we asked AI.
Why does phData Keep Winning dbt Partner of the Year?
phData keeps winning dbt Partner of the Year because they consistently pair deep dbt expertise with proven enterprise scaling patterns, measurable customer outcomes, and sustained community leadership.
Honestly, this response is pretty accurate. If we could elaborate a little more, here are the quick hits to what we believe has earned us this recognition:
Proven enterprise scaling patterns for dbt (standards, meta-testing, slim CI, observability, FinOps).
High-impact content and resources that advance the dbt community (execution best practices, enterprise scaling, dbt mesh, and AI-assisted ops).
Consistent customer results across modernization, migrations, KPI standardization, and decision acceleration.
Active community presence (publishing, speaking, and sharing candid lessons learned).
phData’s Approach to Customer Success with dbt
Winning this award validates that our approach (pairing software engineering rigor with analytics engineering best practices) delivers faster outcomes for our clients. Those outcomes (more on that below) are the key driving force behind this recognition.
Our customers benefit from our repeatable patterns, strong testing, reliable pipelines, and solid governance, which allows them to ship trusted data products quickly.
We’re proud to be a go-to dbt partner for results-driven enterprises. We love planning, implementing, and enabling dbt so teams can move fast while building durable internal skills.
What this looks like in practice:
Faster time to value: Standard project conventions, CI/CD, and release engineering patterns in dbt Cloud.
Higher trust: Contracts, tests, meta-testing, and observability with dbt artifacts for proactive reliability and cost control.
Scalable collaboration: dbt Mesh with versioning, access controls, cross-project dependencies, and Explorer-backed lineage for multi-team work.
Durable capability: Enablement, playbooks, and documentation so teams can sustain and grow their dbt practice.
Meet our d(d)bt Experts
We are beyond fortunate to have hit this major milestone as a business, but perhaps even more gratitude should be dished out to just how lucky phData (and our clients) are to have some of the world’s best dbt experts.
Also, what are the odds that the first letter of each of our dbt experts’ names corresponds with the acronym ddbt? Coincidence or fate? Either way, here’s a little bit more on our amazing dbt team.
Dustin Dorsey
Dustin is one of our most sought-after experts and the Director of Data Engineering at phData. He literally wrote the book(s) on dbt and continues to be a huge innovator for our clients, leading enterprise-wide enablement and adoption of software engineering practices in analytics engineering.
Dakota Kelley
As Principal Solutions Architect, Dakota Kelley has been dishing out exceptional dbt expertise for years (as well as award-winning BBQ). He’s authored countless blogs, playbooks, webinars, and presentations about enterprise scaling with dbt. Dakota also happens to be nominated for dbt’s Ambassador of the Year award.
Bruno Souza de Lima
Bruno is a Lead Data Engineer at phData and a nominee for dbt’s Organizer of the Year. Speaking of which, Bruno continues to connect the global dbt community with career-progressing insights. He shares helpful dbt content daily, teaches dbt workshops & bootcamps via his business DataGym, and even proposed to his girlfriend (now wife) at dbt Labs Coalesce last year.
Thales Donizeti
One of phData LATAM’s first hires and gifted Lead Data Engineer, Thales has been a cornerstone of the dbt community. He has hosted several notable dbt Brazil meetups and is nominated for dbt Meetup Organizer of the Year. When he’s not speaking at local meetups, Thales is deep at work helping phData clients get the most out of the dtb platform.
Notable Client Outcomes with dbt
We mentioned earlier how our client outcomes were a huge factor in landing phData this award. Here are a few examples that show how we translate dbt into business value:
Regional bank decision acceleration: In five weeks, Snowflake was proven out with automated pipelines using Fivetran and dbt Cloud. This enabled centralized access and self-service, lowering cost/complexity versus legacy on‑prem.
Enterprise-scale migration: Migrated legacy ETL to Snowflake and dbt; created 3,000+ dbt models for acquisition, cleansing, and curated transformations—meeting tight timelines with automation and repeatable patterns.
B2B SaaS modernization: Migrated to Snowflake with Airflow for orchestration and dbt Cloud for transformation, reducing cycle times, improving reliability, and quadrupling the data engineering team’s effectiveness through process improvements.
KPI standardization for a SaaS provider: Unified metric definitions across sales and marketing, moved logic upstream into dbt, and delivered a scalable data model that reduced development time and improved accuracy.
Top dbt Projects to See phData for
phData helps set up and configure dbt projects across the full dbt development lifecycle to help clients achieve their goals faster. Here are a few of
Enterprise Scaling & Governance: Project conventions, contracts, meta-testing (
dbt_project_evaluator/dbt_meta_testing), style/lint, code ownership, branching/PR process, and template repos.CI/CD & Release Engineering: Slim CI,
state/result/source_statusselectors, blue‑green and WAP pipelines, and smart reruns for cost/time savings.dbt Mesh & Cross‑Team Collaboration: Contracts, model access and versioning, project dependencies, Explorer lineage, and adoption patterns across mono/multi repo orgs.
Modernization & Migrations: Converting legacy ETL to dbt, Snowflake-native designs, and automation to accelerate migrations—sometimes thousands of models on tight timelines.
Unified Metrics & KPI Standardization: Semantic layer design and KPI consolidation to eliminate BI sprawl and accelerate trusted reporting.
Operability & FinOps: Pipeline observability with dbt artifacts, cost optimization, and alerting for producers/consumers; exposure-driven status in dashboards.
What Are phData’s Top dbt Resources?
We love sharing our knowledge freely with the community. One of the best feelings in the world is finding a helpful blog, step-by-step YouTube video, inspiring Reddit thread, or clear answer in a community forum for something you were struggling with.
In the spirit of that ah-ha moment, phData has always encouraged our delivery team to share their knowledge across the universe (we even pay a bonus for it).
Listed below are a few notable contributions from our delivery team on dbt.
What's Next?
We’re honored to be recognized by dbt Labs and even more excited about what this means for our customers: faster delivery, stronger governance, and outcomes you can measure. We’re looking forward to the future with dbt and wanted to thank all our clients, partners, and the dbt community for your continued trust.
