About DRE

DRE, the Declarative Reporting Engine, turns recurring reports into SQL and YAML in git, then builds the workbook, PDF, bank file or Slack message and delivers it on schedule. It exists because the last step of most data work, getting the numbers to the person who asked, is still a pile of one-off scripts.

Why it exists

A recurring report usually starts as an afternoon’s work: a query, some formatting code and an email. Then the requests arrive. Finance wants a second tab, the bank wants a fixed-width file over SFTP, every client wants their own copy, and someone asks for September again because refunds came in late. Each request is reasonable, and each one becomes more code that only its author understands.

dbt solved this for data transformation: models became reviewed SQL in git, and nobody writes code to run them in the right order any more. DRE applies the same idea to the reports people receive. The SQL stays as it is; a short YAML file says what the file looks like and where it goes; formatting, delivery, retries, secrets and logs are the tool’s job, done the same way for every report.

How it is made

Open source

DRE core and the first-party plugins are GPL-3.0, developed in public on GitHub. Anyone can read the code, file an issue or send a change.

Released often

Each release has notes and upgrade guides, and the docs on this site match the released version, with older versions kept one click away.

Tested end to end

The public examples run in CI on every change, and a separate demo project runs every feature against real databases, file servers and mail before a release.

Plugins with their own versions

Sources, formats and destinations are separate packages with their own version numbers, so a fix to one doesn’t wait for the rest.

The current release is DRE 0.11.1. Release notes ·Documentation · Licensing · Privacy · Terms

Who is behind it

DRE was started by Allen Fei Xu, an analytics engineer in Melbourne, Australia. Allen has worked in data across consulting, banking and product teams, on every step from extraction and modelling to dashboards and the reports people receive. DRE came from that last step: each new recurring report meant writing formatting and delivery code again, and Allen wanted the next report to reuse what the last one had built.

DRE is built in the open by its maintainers and contributors. Release notes and short demos are also posted on LinkedIn.

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