Reduce, reuse, recycle: how dbt State cut rebuilds by 92% at RxBenefits
RxBenefits' Chris Shepherd and Andrew Coleman share the real numbers behind a 59% drop in warehouse spend and a 92% model reuse rate after adopting dbt State
Overview
RxBenefits had inefficient model execution despite prior Snowflake/dbt optimization. Implementing dbt State eliminated unnecessary rebuilds, reusing 92% of model builds monthly and cutting Snowflake compute costs 57% in production, with a reusable business-case framework.
What you'll take away
- 01
dbt State let RxBenefits skip, zero-copy clone, or rebuild each model individually instead of recreating identical tables and views on a fixed schedule out of caution.
- 02
Over a 60-day production window, RxBenefits cut warehouse costs 59%, reused more than 716,000 models instead of rebuilding them, and cut cumulative query run time by roughly two weeks.
- 03
dbt State has real limits worth auditing for first: models built on select * can't verify whether upstream columns changed, so they rebuild every time unless columns are referenced explicitly.
Session speakers
Chris Shepherd
RX BenefitsAndrew Coleman
RX Benefits