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Revamped dbt experience

Migration timeline

Atlan recommends migrating to the revamped dbt experience for improved product capabilities. All dbt fixes and new product capabilities are supported on the revamped version only. Atlan no longer supports the old experience starting February 15, 2026.

This FAQ explains the revamped dbt experience, highlighting what’s changing, why it matters, and what to know before migrating.

What is changing in the revamped dbt experience?​

Atlan now creates a separate dbt asset for each environment run. For example, if your customers model runs in both Production and Staging, you see two assets in Atlan: customers (Production) and customers (Staging).

What are the benefits of migrating to the revamped experience?​

Separating assets by environment provides several benefits:

  • Environment-specific metadata: Each environment asset has its own metadata. Previously, Atlan used metadata from the last run across all environments to enrich a single asset, which resulted in incorrect or missing metadata.

  • Environment-specific lineage: Each environment asset has its own lineage. The previous experience resulted in incorrect or missing lineage.

  • Enhanced capabilities: The revamped experience includes:

    • View the last 5 runs of a dbt asset in a given environment
    • View detailed error messages for failed runs
    • Table-level dbt sources (previously grouped all tables into one source, resulting in incorrect or missing metadata and lineage)
    • Improved dbt workflow performance
    • View both compiled and raw SQL for assets

What changes after migration?​

The first workflow run after migration takes longer than normal because Atlan deletes old dbt assets and publishes new dbt assets. Instead of updating a few assets that were modified, all dbt assets are deleted and new dbt assets are created. Note that underlying materialized assets aren't deleted.

Since old dbt assets are deleted, the following changes occur:

  • Asset FQN and GUIDs change: This affects:

    • Any playbooks or code that manually update dbt asset metadata or lineage won't work properly because the FQN/GUID equivalent dbt asset no longer exists
    • Existing access management policies that depend on dbt asset FQNs won't function properly
    • You need to manually add new dbt assets to favorites if you had any
    • Depending on how you created Atlan data products, assets appear under the data product but are marked as (archived):
      • If data products were manually selected: you need to re-add them as part of your data product
      • If data products were created using filters: you don't need to do anything; all new assets appear in the domain automatically

  • Manually updated metadata or lineage is deleted: If you manually updated metadata through the UI or API, this metadata or lineage isn't retained. This applies to dbt assets only, not materialized assets.

If you have any of these cases, note them down to update them after migration.

How do I migrate to the revamped experience?​

  • By default, new dbt connections run on the revamped experience.
  • For existing connections: Migration is as simple as a button click. Go to Workflows Center > Manage > search for your dbt connection > open its profile > in the top right corner, next to the Add schedule button, click Upgrade to new dbt experience > a pop-up message appears to confirm your selection > click Upgrade.

Atlan is dedicated to helping you with the migration. Contact Atlan support for assistance.

See also​

Need help​

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