dbt is the industry-standard tool for transforming data in your warehouse. You write modular transformations as plain SQL select statements, and dbt handles the dependencies between them, builds the resulting tables and views, and tests them.

Qyra reads a connected dbt project and builds your semantic layer from it. Your dbt models define what the tables are; the Qyra metadata in their YAML defines what they mean — which columns are dimensions, which aggregations are metrics, how models join.

dbt is not required. If you don't use it, define the same semantic layer in Qyra YAML instead. This area covers the dbt integration itself: connecting a project, keeping it in sync, moving definitions between Qyra and your repository, and what changes when you upgrade dbt.

For how to shape models so they explore well, see modeling strategies.