Add a sort parameter to star.sql

[gfasano]

Add a sort paramater that will sort in alphabetical order the return of the column name

Problem

My use case was to do UNION ALL on severall intermediary queries (not materialized data) with large amount of columns (arround 130) not ordered.

I tried to use the dbt_utils.union_relation but it work only on materialized data on I founded that overkilled to stock in database intermediary data just to do an UNION.

What I am currently doing to avoid that is as follow :

{% set column_list = dbt_utils.get_filtered_columns_in_relation( ref('original_data'))|sort %}

with partial_table_transformed as (
SELECT 
      *,
      [transformation to compute new_column_A and new_column_B, that changed the order of all the original column such as join or group by]
FROM {{ ref('original_data') }}
WHERE need_to_be_transformed = 1
),

partial_table_not_transformed as (
SELECT 
      *
FROM {{ ref('original_data') }}
WHERE need_to_be_transformed = 0
),

SELECT
    {{ column_list | join(', ') }}, 
    new_column_A, 
    new_column_B
FROM partial_table_transformed
UNION ALL
SELECT
    {{ column_list | join(', ') }},
    NULL as new_column_A, 
    NULL as new_column_B, 
FROM partial_table_not_transformed

Solution

It would be great to do as such :

SELECT
    {{ dbt_utils.star(ref('original_data'), sort = True) }}
    new_column_A, 
    new_column_B
FROM partial_table_transformed
UNION ALL
SELECT
    {{ dbt_utils.star(ref('original_data'), sort = True) }}
    NULL as new_column_A, 
    NULL as new_column_B, 
FROM partial_table_not_transformed

Checklist

• This code is associated to this issue which has been triaged and accepted for development.
• I have read the contributing guide and understand what's expected of me
• I have run this code in development and it appears to resolve the stated issue
• This PR includes tests, or tests are not required/relevant for this PR
• I have updated the README.md (if applicable)