Trials and Tribulations of Incremental Models

Incremental models are core to dbt, and are a key solution to how data teams balance the need for computationally efficient and timeline data.

This talk will discuss some challenges with building incremental models at scale, and how our approach has evolved over time in a high growth company with over 30 third party sources of data. On a technical level, this will cover the is_incremental() SQL block logic, as well as custom materializations that make building models simpler and more efficient.