Data Engineering

Incremental Models in dbt Without the Pain

Late-arriving data, backfills and idempotency — the three problems every incremental model eventually meets.

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7 min read

Three problems, one pattern

Late-arriving data, backfills and idempotency show up in every incremental model eventually. The fix is the same each time: make the model safe to run twice, and make the window you reprocess an explicit parameter instead of an assumption.