DuckDB, dbt, and the Death of Pipeline Glue

Many data teams spend more time operating the path into dbt than improving the models dbt is meant to serve. This talk explores how DuckDB-powered federation can expand the ELT toolbox: external sources can be queried directly, staging tables can be materialized with dbt, and the transformation graph can remain explicit, tested, and documented. We’ll cover the tradeoffs, operational safeguards, where this pattern works well, and how it fits alongside traditional ELT and managed replication.