Quickstart: Elementary dbt package

A dbt package is additional Jinja and SQL code that is added to your project, for additional functionality. In fact, each package is a dbt project. By adding a package to your project, you are adding the package code to be part of your project, you can reference it’s macros, execute it’s models, and so on.

Add packages to your project by creating a ‘packages.yml’ file under the main project directory (where your ‘dbt_project.yml is), and adding the relevant package. After you add a new package, run dbt deps to actually pull it’s code to your project. This is also how you update packages. Some packages we recommend you check out: dbt_utils, dbt_date, codegen.

The short answer is yes. We recommend that Elementary models will have their own schema, but it is not mandatory. You can change the schema name by using dbt custom schema configuration on your dbt_project.yml. In short, the default dbt generate_schema_name macro concatenate the value provided in schema configuration key to the target schema, as in: target_schema_custom_schema.

If you want a different behaviour, like configuring a full name for the Elementary schema, you can override the default generate_schema_name macro with your logic. Before you do that, make sure that there isn’t already a macro named generate_schema_name.sql in your project.

Here is a macro you can use that would search for a config under meta named schema_name. If it exists, that would be the schema name. If not - the original dbt logic would be followed:

{% macro generate_schema_name(custom_schema_name, node) -%}

    {%- set default_schema = target.schema -%}
    {% set config_meta = node.config.get('meta') %}

    {% if config_meta and config_meta is mapping %}
        {% set schema_name = config_meta.get('schema_name') %}
        {% if schema_name and schema_name is string %}
            {{ return(schema_name) }}
        {% endif %}

    {%- elif custom_schema_name is none -%}

        {{ default_schema }}

    {%- else -%}

        {{ default_schema }}_{{ custom_schema_name | trim }}

    {%- endif -%}

{%- endmacro %}

If you implement this macro and want to name the Elementary schema elementary_data_observability:

models:
  elementary:
    +meta:
      schema_name: "elementary_data_observability"

For elementary to work, it needs to create some of the models as incremental tables. Make sure that there are no global materialization configurations that affect elementary, such as:

materialized: "{{ 'table' if target.name == 'prod-cloud' else 'view' }}"

Make sure to place the ‘elementary’ configuration under the models key, and other configs under your project name.

Example:

models:
  my_project:
    materialized: "{{ 'table' if target.name == 'prod-cloud' else 'view' }}"

  elementary:
    +schema: "elementary"

If you change materialization settings, make sure to run dbt run -s elementary --full-refresh.