We’re excited to introduce Sync Back to dbt, our newest feature, which helps you easily keep your data’s documentation close to your code. With Sync Back, Data Admins can push table and column descriptions back to dbt directly from Castor. This means documentation can now originate from one source of truth within Castor, keep it in-house, and be versioned alongside your code in Github.
Sync Back goes beyond the traditional role of a data catalog as a passive extractor and actively participates in your data stack. Now, you can use Sync Back to pull data and push descriptions back into dbt and eventually other integrations, such as Tableau and Looker.
Rather than checking out a new branch and opening a PR to make documentation updates in dbt, make updates directly in your data catalog and then push it out with a few clicks.
This means you can use Castor’s automated features like propagation for column descriptions, let your team fill in the documentation gaps, then sync back all of that to dbt to be natively visible to your data engineering team in Github.
Data documentation is invaluable when it can be accessed and understood by all data users in an organization. A data catalog is a great place to start, but there are often other documentation streams, like in dbt.
Sync Back guarantees that documentation is accessible in both Castor and dbt, so contributors can make updates in both places and keep your documentation streams in sync. The result? Better communication to help you focus on driving business impact across your organization. When the data and accompanying documentation are available from a centralized and versioned source of truth, everyone can drive impact quickly and precisely.
Sync Back opens up many possibilities for more active integrations in the data ecosystem. Right now, Sync Back works only with dbt, but keep an eye out for new integrations with other powerful tools soon.
Learn more and try out Sync Back with dbt here.
Dani Kellogg
Sr Product Marketing Manager
