Roadmap

The trust primitives (compiler, branches, run records, lineage, contracts, cost attribution) are production-grade on Databricks. Here is the state of everything else.

Shipped and production-grade

• Databricks is the production target for 2026: SQL Statement API, Unity Catalog, OAuth M2M, adaptive concurrency, and schema-prefix branches. Warehouse-native SHALLOW CLONE is a follow-up.
• The compiler. Typed column-level inference, the diagnostic codes, and the language server all behave the same in CI and in your editor.
• Branches and run records. A named branch is an isolated schema. Each run writes a content-addressed record, meaning the artifacts are keyed by the hash of their bytes. rocky replay inspects that record. For a deterministic model, rocky replay --execute --verify re-runs the recorded recipe locally on DuckDB and reproduces the output bit for bit. Add --warehouse to re-run it in an isolated replay schema on the live warehouse instead.
• Cost attribution. Per-model cost lands on every run record, and [budget] blocks fail a run on overspend.
• The AI compile-validate loop. rocky ai generates a model, compiles it, and auto-fixes parse errors before it lands.
• Deterministic surrogate keys. A model declares a [[surrogate_key]] block, and rocky run injects a dialect-correct hash column at materialization on DuckDB, Databricks, Snowflake, and BigQuery. On a given warehouse the value matches what dbt Core’s dbt_utils.generate_surrogate_key produces over the same columns. A key therefore joins across a Rocky / dbt Core boundary either way.
• Named and inline tests. Define a data-quality assertion once in models/test_definitions.toml and apply it by name with [[use_test]], overriding the column, severity, or filter at the use site. It is the declarative analogue of dbt Core’s generic tests. Inline [[tests]] keep working alongside. References resolve when the project loads, so a typo fails the load instead of silently dropping a check. See data quality checks.
• Fixture-driven unit tests. A model’s sidecar declares [[test]] blocks with mocked upstream inputs (given) and an expected output (expect). rocky test seeds a fresh in-memory DuckDB, materializes the model against the fixtures, and compares the result. No warehouse connection is needed. See testing.
• Config groups. A config group in models/groups/<name>.toml fans shared routing and strategy out to every model that opts in with group = "<name>", so a one-line change reaches the whole group. With enforce = true the group’s fields become binding. A member that diverges locally from the group-controlled schema or strategy fails the load instead of drifting silently.
• Model tags. A model declares a [tags] block of governance attributes (domain, tier, owner). A config group can supply a [tags] baseline that every member inherits, and the model’s own tags override it per key. Resolved tags appear on rocky compile --output json for orchestrators to read.
• rocky emit-sql. Renders the runnable SQL each transformation model would produce, offline and with no warehouse connection, to stdout or one file per model. A Rocky project always reduces to plain SQL in dependency order, so adopting Rocky is never a one-way door. See No lock-in.
• The agent policy plane. A [policy] block grades what a principal (a person, CI, or an AI agent) may do, by capability and scope: allow, require review, or deny. Enforcement runs at apply, at promote, and on the MCP write tools, and every decision, including a denial, goes to the ledger. Blast-radius ceilings downgrade an allow to a review. verify_after holds an apply to its own run’s checks. Autonomy budgets tighten on repeated failure and recover only as those failures age out of the configured window. rocky policy freeze is the kill switch, and rocky policy test runs pinned [[policy.tests]] scenarios through the real evaluator so CI catches a loosened rule. See Operating Rocky with agents and Testing policies.
• Self-healing, rung by rung. A proven-transient failure (a warming warehouse, a 429, a lock conflict) is retried within a small bounded budget, on by default. Opt-in containment withholds a failed model’s downstream closure, still materializes the disjoint subgraphs, and reports an honest partial failure. Auto-apply is confined to provably additive source drift, behind an explicit opt-in plus a policy grant. A backfill is always a review-gated plan.
• Reclamation with proof. rocky gc --derivable inventories artifacts whose recorded recipe is bound to their exact bytes. Eviction is review-gated, even for a person, and leaves a tombstone. rocky restore re-derives the artifact and reinstates it only when the rebuilt bytes match the recorded hash exactly. Otherwise it refuses. Restore covers recipes that read no recorded upstreams; a multi-input recipe cannot be rebuilt yet, so eviction is not reversible for every artifact.
• The governor’s surface. rocky brief renders an estate digest with every line cited to the ledger. rocky audit --for <table|run|plan> walks a custody chain end to end. rocky audit --scorecard reports acceptance and escalation rates per principal or rule, and rocky review --queue ranks pending escalations. A signal the ledger does not hold renders as not recorded, never as a fabricated number.
• A browser UI. rocky serve --ui serves a read-only view of the same data: the estate and its DAG, the review queue with one plan in full, and the governor’s brief, scorecard, custody, audit and product journal. See the browser UI guide.
• An embeddable engine. rocky serve exposes /api/v1 with outputs byte-identical to the CLI’s --output json, an async job model, and a generated OpenAPI 3.1 document. The Embedding guide covers the four integration patterns. rocky mcp is the agent-facing surface (31 tools). The recipe-manifest spec and the standalone rocky-verify binary let a third party check a manifest offline, with no engine installed.

Beta

• Snowflake, BigQuery, and Trino. Connection, execution, and the core run loop work. Conformance coverage is still growing. We test against live warehouses, so corner cases get reported and fixed quickly. If your enterprise warehouse is Snowflake or BigQuery and you need it production-grade today, open a discussion. We want the failure reports.
• Iceberg. REST-catalog source discovery works. Content-addressed writes round-trip as Iceberg through Delta UniForm, end to end.

On the 2026 roadmap

• Iceberg-native writes, without the Delta intermediate.
• The wider AI surface. The compile-validate loop is shipped. The larger workflow comes next: rename a column, regenerate the downstream models and their assertions, run the tests, ship.
• A semantic layer. Rocky’s typed IR is the right home for one. Until it exists, integrate with Cube, the dbt Semantic Layer, or your existing metric store.

Where this is going

Data platforms are heading somewhere specific. Most pipeline changes will be authored by agents rather than people. The question that matters shifts from “can we build it” to “can we trust what was built.”

Rocky’s long arc is the governed estate. Humans declare the invariants: contracts, policies, budgets. Agents do the operating: author, run, diagnose, remediate. The engine checks each mutating step and records what it decided, so any consumer, human or machine, can read a table’s recorded custody before relying on it. Read that record as best-effort: a failed ledger write warns and lets the operation continue, and a refusal issued before the rules are evaluated writes no row at all.

The pieces above are that arc’s foundation, shipped in their first form: the policy plane, the custody ledger, bit-exact replay, and the engine-free manifest verifier. The recipe-manifest spec is deliberately an open format. The proof a table carries should outlive any one tool, including this one.

Handled by an integration, not built in

• Extraction from SaaS sources. Use Fivetran, Airbyte, Stitch, or warehouse-native CDC. Rocky discovers what they land and takes over from there.
• Orchestration beyond Dagster. Dagster has a native integration, and rocky serve covers small standalone teams. Airflow and Prefect call the rocky binary like any other CLI; native integrations are not shipped.

Tell us where it hurts

The roadmap is shaped by where production pipelines are getting hurt. If one of these gaps blocks your team, open a discussion.