How to Build Incremental Models | dbt tutorial

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You don't need to process every record in a table, every time.

Fortunately, dbt has a great solution for this scenario with their "incremental" materialization option.

When setup properly, they can help you significantly cut costs & processing time.

This is because incremental models only process new data vs rebuilding an entire table (the default setting).

But setting up incremental models isn't always straight forward.

It requires a few steps, an understanding of underlying functionality and some customization.

All that to say, I've noticed this process trips people up and therefore they put off implementing it.

So in today's video I'd like to help you out by covering:
- What incremental models in dbt are all about
- Step by step how to build one
- The process to add/update new data

Thank you for watching!

Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
0:27 - What are incremental models?
1:45 - How to use is_incremental()
4:06 - Inserting new data
5:31 - Update existing data
6:57 - Handling schema changes
9:39 - Using the --full-refresh flag

Title & Tags:
How to Build Incremental Models | dbt tutorial
#kahandatasolutions #dataengineering #dbt

[patriciaayuso]

Quick and simple way to explain dbt incremental models. Thanks for that!
Any idea how to avoid those duplicates when doing the full-refresh you showed at the end?

[berkbulten]

Great content! Really appreciated all the tutorials regarding dbt! We are using incremental model for a while and the challenge we have is there are some tables with `id` unique identifier without any up-to-date date. Incremental model works to add only new records but fails to update previous records if there has been a change in any of the columns because we do not have any field like updated_at. Do you have any suggestions how can we solve this? For example, insert new records with new ids and update if there has been a change in a ´X´ column.

Thank you!

[abiddeveloper]

Hello Kahan, I am following you since the beginning, now I am up to the dbt,
please correct me if I'm wrong, we can do the same transformation with AWS Lambda Functions, by triggers or schedule, if the answer is yes, what would you recommend on AWS is it DBT or Lambda.
And if we want to use dbt, please let me know where to host DBT project, to run it as cron job from github actions. can we host dbt on github and execute as a cronjob.
Thank you so much in advance.

[bienchen]

What if my dbt model is about grouping or joining sources? Сan i make it incremental?

[abeeya]

Could you please make a video on how to read static files from s3 and use it create model in dbt, thank you