Materialization Battlecards
Recall the tradeoffs between dbt materializations under review pressure.
Compare View or table? Choose where the compute cost should live. Objection Let’s make every slow model incremental. Say this Incremental helps when we can identify changed rows and keep a correct unique key; otherwise it can preserve old mistakes faster. Treating incremental as a universal performance switch. It ties performance to correctness conditions. When is ephemeral useful? For lightweight reusable SQL that should be inlined rather than stored. Avoid it for heavy transformations that make final compiled SQL hard to reason about. What evidence belongs in a materialization PR? Runtime, downstream use, freshness requirement, and rebuild/full-refresh behavior. The materialization…
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