# dbt Core v2.0.0-rc.1

- Product: dbt Core (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/dbt-core)
- Vendor: dbt Labs
- Date: 2026-09-02
- Version: v2.0.0-rc.1
- Original notes: https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/releases/tag/v2.0.0-rc.1
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/dbt-core/releases/v2.0.0-rc.1
- Labels: Pre-release

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

---

- **added** — Add Exasol adapter (Phase 1) with connection/auth, TLS and timeout profile options, metadata adapter, type conversion, reserved-keyword auto-quoting, materializations, snapshots, model contracts, constraints, grants, persist_docs, catalog generation, source-freshness, cross-database utilities, and interactive dbt init setup
- **added** — Add Databricks query tags with automatic dbt metadata and profile- and model-level configuration
- **added** — Add parse-safe views (dbt.graph_nodes, dbt.models, dbt.seeds, dbt.tests, dbt.snapshots, dbt.sources, dbt.analyses, dbt.operations, dbt.functions, dbt.columns) for standalone querying of exported index
- **added** — Add ClickHouse configs for definer, sql_security, and inserts_only
- **added** — Track ref()/source()/this call provenance during Jinja rendering with on_this_reference listener hook for dbt.hard_coded_reference lint rule
- **changed** — ClickHouse model settings and query_settings configs now render into DDL with version-gated DDL using real server version
- **changed** — ClickHouse incremental strategies now resolve and validate like the Python adapter with on_schema_change support for codec-aware ALTERs
- **changed** — Fusion accepts Databricks Python environment_key and environment_dependencies and uses them on serverless job submit
- **changed** — OSS CLI now builds as a binary named dbt instead of dbt-sa-cli
- **fixed** — Fix regression in log-format-file use
- **fixed** — Allow Databricks incremental models to use delete+insert with correctly quoted unique keys
- **fixed** — Include invocation IDs in default Databricks query comments and preserve run-operation connection names
- **fixed** — Disambiguate generated generic-test SQL asset paths on name collisions so tests are no longer silently dropped from the manifest
- **fixed** — Stop the v2 parser emitting a null macros key for unit tests that set overrides without macros
- **fixed** — Accept sequence-valued column_types, mapping-valued event_time, scalar policy_tags, and the legacy data-paths alias
- **fixed** — Preserve declaration order when rendering Databricks table properties
- **fixed** — Databricks: emit INSERT BY NAME REPLACE WHERE only when DBR 18.0+ supports the combination
- **fixed** — The download-at-install sdist now declares runtime dependencies and requires-python of the wheel it installs
- **fixed** — Apply Databricks model and column constraints only when contract.enforced is true
- **fixed** — Accept config value shapes dbt Core tolerates including mapping-valued constraints, list-valued dist, and unquoted YAML 1.1 booleans
- **security** — Skip symlink, hard link, and device entries when extracting package tarballs

##### 2.0.0-rc.1

Released September 02, 2026

###### Features

- Add Exasol adapter (Phase 1): connection/auth with TLS and timeout profile options, metadata adapter, agate/seed type conversion (incl. HASHTYPE) and typed SQL literals, reserved-keyword auto-quoting, and the full macro bundle — materializations (table/view/incremental append·merge·delete+insert·microbatch), snapshots (timestamp/check, hard deletes), model contracts and constraints, on_schema_change, grants, persist_docs for tables and views, catalog generation, source-freshness, cross-database utils (dateadd/datediff/last_day/hash/bool_or/listagg/safe_cast/equals/split_part), distribute_by/partition_by/primary_key configs, and interactive dbt init setup
- Add Databricks query tags with automatic dbt metadata and profile- and model-level configuration. ([#15701](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/15701))
- Fusion accepts Databricks Python environment_key and environment_dependencies and uses them on serverless job submit (https://github.com/databricks/dbt-databricks/issues/1636). ([#15966](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/15966))
- Add parse-safe views (dbt.graph_nodes, dbt.models, dbt.seeds, dbt.tests, dbt.snapshots, dbt.sources, dbt.analyses, dbt.operations, dbt.functions, dbt.columns) so standalone querying of an exported index (views.sql) never silently exposes a compile-only or never-populated column at parse time.
- [ClickHouse] New configs available: definer, sql_security, inserts_only. Available but not working yet: projections, codec. ([#14585](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/14585))
- [ClickHouse] Model settings and query_settings configs now render into DDL, and version-gated DDL uses the real server version via a once-per-process probe. ([#14585](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/14585))
- [ClickHouse] clickhouse_s3source() renders the s3() table function, and model contracts are enforced end-to-end (constraint rendering, per-column codec/ttl, real column types). ([#14585](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/14585))
- Track ref()/source()/this call provenance during Jinja rendering (on_this_reference listener hook), powering the dbt.hard_coded_reference (DBT05) lint rule ([#16080](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/16080))
- [ClickHouse] Incremental strategies now resolve and validate exactly like the Python adapter (delete+insert, insert_overwrite, microbatch), and on_schema_change (fail/append_new_columns/sync_all_columns) works on incremental models with codec-aware ALTERs. ([#14585](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/14585))

###### Fixes

- Fix regression in log-format-file use ([#15685](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/15685))
- Allow Databricks incremental models to use `delete+insert` with correctly quoted unique keys ([#15250](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/15250))
- Include invocation IDs in default Databricks query comments and preserve run-operation connection names ([#15689](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/15689))
- Disambiguate generated generic-test SQL asset paths on name collisions so tests on different models/columns that flatten to the same generated name are no longer silently dropped from the manifest
- Stop the v2 parser emitting a null `macros` key for unit tests that set `overrides` without `macros`, which made dbt-core fail to deserialize the fusion-produced manifest ([#16009](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/16009))
- Accept sequence-valued column_types, mapping-valued event_time, scalar policy_tags, and the legacy data-paths alias to match dbt-core's YAML config acceptance
- Preserve declaration order when rendering Databricks table properties ([#16036](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/16036))
- Databricks: emit INSERT BY NAME REPLACE WHERE only when DBR 18.0+ supports the combination, and warn when insert_overwrite cannot honor REPLACE ON on older clusters ([#15999](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-c

_[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/releases/tag/v2.0.0-rc.1]_