dbt-confluent

The dbt adapter for Confluent Cloud Flink SQL.

Build, test, and manage streaming data transformations on Confluent Cloud using dbt's familiar development workflow.

Overview

dbt-confluent lets you use dbt to define and run SQL transformations on Confluent Cloud's fully managed Apache Flink service. It supports both batch-style and streaming materializations, enabling continuous data pipelines defined as dbt models.

Features:

• Standard dbt materializations (table, view, ephemeral) adapted for Flink SQL
• Streaming-native materializations (streaming_table, streaming_source) for continuous data pipelines
• Materialized views powered by Flink's continuous query execution
• Integration with Confluent Cloud connectors (e.g., Datagen/Faker) via streaming_source

See Materializations for the full list and details.

Installation

pip install dbt-confluent

or with uv:

uv add dbt-confluent

Requires Python 3.10+.

Configuration

After installing, scaffold a new project with:

dbt init my_project

Select confluent as the adapter and fill in the prompts for your Confluent Cloud credentials (API key, compute pool, environment, etc.).

Concept mapping

Confluent Cloud Flink uses different terminology than traditional databases. Here's how dbt concepts map to Flink and Confluent Cloud:

dbt concept	Flink concept	Confluent Cloud entity
database	Catalog	Environment
schema	Database	Kafka cluster

Schema configuration

Unlike most dbt adapters, dbt-confluent cannot create or drop schemas — a dbt schema maps to a Flink database (Kafka cluster) in Confluent Cloud, which is managed externally. Both the dbname in your profiles.yml and any model-level schema config must reference an existing Flink database by name:

# dbt_project.yml
models:
  my_project:
    +schema: my-kafka-cluster

Usage

Streaming table

A streaming table creates a table and runs a continuous INSERT query against it:

-- models/pageviews_enriched.sql
{{
  config(
    materialized='streaming_table',
    with={'changelog.mode': 'append'}
  )
}}

SELECT
  p.user_id,
  p.page_url,
  u.username
FROM {{ ref('pageviews') }} p
JOIN {{ ref('users') }} u ON p.user_id = u.user_id

Streaming source

A streaming source creates a connector-backed source table. The model SQL defines the column definitions:

-- models/datagen_users.sql
{{
  config(
    materialized='streaming_source',
    connector='faker',
    with={'rows-per-second': '10'}
  )
}}

`user_id` INT,
`username` STRING,
`email` STRING

See Materializations for the full list and details.

Known Limitations

• No schema management: Flink databases (Kafka clusters) cannot be created or dropped — they are managed in Confluent Cloud.
• No table renames: ALTER TABLE RENAME is not supported; to effectively rename a model you must drop and recreate the underlying table, which for table, streaming_table, and streaming_source materializations requires running with --full-refresh.
• No transactions: Flink SQL is non-transactional.
• No snapshots: Flink SQL lacks the batch operations (MERGE, UPDATE) required by dbt snapshots.
• No incremental: dbt's batch-incremental semantics does not map to Flink's continuous processing model. Use streaming_table instead.

Development

git clone https://github.com/confluentinc/dbt-confluent
cd dbt-confluent
uv sync --extra dev --extra test

Code quality

uv run ruff check dbt/ tests/
uv run ruff format --check dbt/ tests/

Running tests

Tests require a Confluent Cloud environment. Set the following environment variables (or add them to a test.env file):

export CONFLUENT_ENV_ID=env-xxxxxx
export CONFLUENT_ORG_ID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
export CONFLUENT_COMPUTE_POOL_ID=lfcp-xxxxx
export CONFLUENT_CLOUD_PROVIDER=aws
export CONFLUENT_CLOUD_REGION=us-west-6
export CONFLUENT_TEST_DBNAME=dbname
export CONFLUENT_FLINK_API_KEY=xxx
export CONFLUENT_FLINK_API_SECRET=xxx

uv run pytest

Versioning

This adapter follows semantic versioning and is versioned independently from dbt Core. Compatibility with dbt Core is declared via dependencies (currently requires dbt-core~=1.11).

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE for details.