Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Update incremental-models.md #6283

Merged
merged 4 commits into from
Oct 16, 2024
Merged
Changes from 2 commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion website/docs/docs/build/incremental-models.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -94,7 +94,7 @@ Not specifying a `unique_key` will result in append-only behavior, which means d

The optional `unique_key` parameter specifies a field (or combination of fields) that defines the grain of your model. That is, the field(s) identify a single unique row. You can define `unique_key` in a configuration block at the top of your model, and it can be a single column name or a list of column names.

The `unique_key` should be supplied in your model definition as a string representing a single column or a list of single-quoted column names that can be used together, for example, `['col1', 'col2', …])`. Columns used in this way should not contain any nulls, or the incremental model run may fail. Either ensure that each column has no nulls (for example with `coalesce(COLUMN_NAME, 'VALUE_IF_NULL')`), or define a single-column [surrogate key](https://www.getdbt.com/blog/guide-to-surrogate-key) (for example with [`dbt_utils.generate_surrogate_key`](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-utils#generate_surrogate_key-source)).
The `unique_key` should be supplied in your model definition as a string representing a single column or a list of single-quoted column names that can be used together, for example, `['col1', 'col2', …])`. Columns used in this way should not contain any nulls, or the incremental model will fail to match rows and propergate duplicate rows. Either ensure that each column has no nulls (for example with `coalesce(COLUMN_NAME, 'VALUE_IF_NULL')`), or define a single-column [surrogate key](https://www.getdbt.com/blog/guide-to-surrogate-key) (for example with [`dbt_utils.generate_surrogate_key`](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-utils#generate_surrogate_key-source)).
mirnawong1 marked this conversation as resolved.
Show resolved Hide resolved

:::tip
In cases where you need multiple columns in combination to uniquely identify each row, we recommend you pass these columns as a list (`unique_key = ['user_id', 'session_number']`), rather than a string expression (`unique_key = 'concat(user_id, session_number)'`).
Expand Down
Loading