Introduction to dbt Core

dbt Setup for Azure PostgreSQL

SQL and Jinja Templating

dbt Tests

Incremental Models, Docs, and Snapshots

Building Your First Mart

Practice

Assignment

Gotchas & Pitfalls

Week 10 Lesson Plan (Teachers)

Gotchas & Pitfalls

Content coming soon...

Suggested Topics

• profiles.yml location: dbt looks in ~/.dbt/ by default, not in your project folder
• Forgetting ref(): hardcoding table names instead of using ref() breaks the DAG
• Jinja whitespace: unexpected blank lines in compiled SQL from Jinja control flow
• Incremental model pitfalls: forgetting unique_key leads to duplicate rows
• Test false confidence: only testing not_null on columns that are already NOT NULL in the database
• Running dbt run without dbt test: deploying untested models to production
• Adapter quirks: PostgreSQL-specific dbt behaviors (e.g., case sensitivity, schema handling)
• Circular dependencies: two models referencing each other causes dbt to fail

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