[andygrd]

Having used it for a little over a year now, I can say that it's strengths may lie in getting junior developer's code more free of bugs and dependency issues. It's just additional overhead when you're trying to do anything more complex, like a Kimball type II slowly changing dimension - then it's just a blocker. Unfortunately, as it becomes a defacto build environment, it's limitations start getting applied to everyone.

[antruok]

The snapshots feature should handle the slowly changing dimensions. But are you saying it's not flexible enough for certain edge cases?

[andygrd]

Yeah, dbt snapshots do a row hash and update if anything in the row changes. We had a source table that had a bunch of daily changing timestamps, e.g. "load date", that we needed to ignore, and focus on a business key. Dbt was an utter torment to try get this going. Ended up building a more elegant framework without it.

[antruok]

So apparently the check_cols parameter didn't help either?

I'm trying to learn about the critical pain points of dbt, and this case seems interesting.