# What is dex?

dex is the everything‑in‑one platform for data engineering.\
It lets you ingest, transform, orchestrate, document, and govern your data in the same place—while borrowing the guardrails that software engineers rely on every day: version control, modular code, automated testing, CI/CD, and rich documentation.

With dex you (and every analyst, engineer, or scientist on your team) can:

* **Connect** to any source with one‑click, fully managed connectors.
* **Build** SQL or Python pipelines that compile into optimized jobs on your own cloud warehouse.
* **Automate** scheduling, testing, and alerting without stitching multiple different tools together.
* **Govern** cost, lineage, access, and data quality from a single control plane.

The result is faster delivery, fewer surprises, and a shared source of truth for every metric and model in your company.

### dex Products

| Product               | Who It's For                                                                             | Highlights                                                                                                    |
| --------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Lakehouse Platform    | Teams that want a complete data platform and zero maintenance overhead                   | Browser‑based IDE, instant connector catalogue, auto‑scaling compute, built‑in monitoring and cost guardrails |
| Professional Services | Companies that need an extra set of senior hands to succeed building a data organization | Architecture design, data model acceleration, and performance tuning delivered by the dex team                |

### The Power of dex

With dex, your focus stays where it should be: modeling business logic. You write simple `SELECT` statements, and dex takes care of the rest—materializing models, managing dependencies, scheduling runs, and ensuring everything operates reliably in your cloud. There’s no need to worry about infrastructure, orchestration, or platform complexity—dex handles all of it for you.

<table data-full-width="false"><thead><tr><th width="266.5">Feature</th><th>Description</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Unified Connectors Catalogue</td><td>Ingest from SaaS apps, databases, streams, and files with simple credentials—no custom code required.</td></tr><tr><td>SQL/Python Compiler</td><td>Templated SQL or Python models compile into optimized, warehouse‑native code, handling dependency ordering, incremental logic, and partition pruning automatically.</td></tr><tr><td>Model Testing</td><td>Built‑in tests for schema, uniqueness, freshness, and accepted values, plus Great Expectations integration for advanced assertions—executed on every run or PR.</td></tr><tr><td>Data Pipeline Documentation</td><td>Lineage graphs, column‑level docs, and metric definitions are auto‑generated from your code and surfaced in an interactive UI—always in sync with the latest deploy</td></tr><tr><td>Load Seed Files</td><td>Version‑controlled CSV or Parquet “seed” files are bulk‑loaded into your warehouse as reference tables, perfect for small lookup datasets or static configurations</td></tr><tr><td>Manage Packages</td><td>A built‑in package manager lets teams publish or install reusable dex/dbt packages from public or private repos, encouraging modular, DRY analytics code.</td></tr><tr><td>Automated Orchestrator</td><td>Order of execution, retries, and DAG visualization are natively integrated into the platform—no Airflow or cron jobs to maintain</td></tr><tr><td>Custom Python Scripts Runner</td><td>Execute arbitrary Python scripts as first‑class pipeline steps, inheriting the same scheduling, logging, and alerting as SQL models.</td></tr><tr><td>Native GitHub/GitLab Integration</td><td>Connect your own Git repository to version-control all models, tests, and configurations. dex supports Git-based workflows with built-in CI/CD hooks, enabling collaborative development, automated deployments, and full change history in your own repo</td></tr><tr><td>Zero Maintenance Deploy and Maintenance</td><td>The fully‑managed dex Cloud handles provisioning, scaling, patching, and monitoring—so your team writes code, not Kubernetes manifests</td></tr><tr><td>Maximum data privacy and security</td><td>Data never leaves your cloud—storage and compute stay inside your VPC for full control, compliance, and auditability</td></tr><tr><td>Multi-cloud support</td><td>Run dex as SaaS or self‑hosted on AWS or GCP. meet security and latency needs without vendor lock‑in</td></tr></tbody></table>