dbt-vertica

Your dbt adapter for Vertica.

Uses vertica-python to connect to Vertica database.

Supported Features

dbt Core Features

Below is a table for what features the current Vertica adapter supports for dbt. This is constantly improving and changing as both dbt adds new functionality, as well as the dbt-vertica driver improves. This list is based upon dbt 1.0.3.

dbt Core Features	Supported
Table Materializations	Yes
Ephemeral Materializations	Yes
View Materializations	Yes
Incremental Materializations - Append	Untested
Incremental Materailizations - Insert + Overwrite	Yes
Incremental Materializations - Merge	Yes
Snapshots - Timestamp	Passes Test
Snapshots - Check Cols	Passes Test
Seeds	Yes
Tests	Yes
Documentation	Yes
External Tables	Untested

• Yes - Supported, and tests pass.
• No - Not supported or implemented.
• Untested - May support out of the box, though hasn't been tested.
• Passes Test -The testes have passed, though haven't tested in a production like environment

Vertica Features

Below is a table for what features the current Vertica adapter supports for Vertica. This is constantly improving and changing as both dbt adds new functionality, as well as the dbt-vertica driver improves.

Vertica Features	Supported
Created/Drop Schema	Yes
Analyze Statistics	No
Purge Delete Vectors	No
Projection Management	No
Primary/Unique Keys	No
Other DDLs	No

Changes

1.0.3

• Refactored the adapter to model after dbt's global_project macros
• Unimplemented functions should throw an exception that it's not implemented. If you stumble across this, please open an Issue or PR so we can investigate.

1.0.2

• Added support for snapshot timestamp with passing tests
• Added support for snapshot check cols with passing tests

1.0.1

• Fixed the Incremental method implementation (was buggy/incomplete)
  • Removed the unique_id as it wasn't implemented
  • Fixed when no fields were added - full table merge
• Added testing for Incremental materialization
  • Testing for dbt Incremental full table
  • Testing for dbt Incremental specified merged columns
• Added more logging to the connector to help understand why tests were failing
• Using the official Vertica CE 11.0.x docker image now for tests

1.0.0

• Add support for DBT version 1.0.0

0.21.1

• Add testing, fix schema drop.

0.21.0

• Add unique_field property on connection, supporting 0.21.x.

0.20.2

• Added SSL options.

0.20.1

• Added the required changes from dbt 0.19.0. Details found here.
• Added support for the MERGE command for incremental loading isntead of DELETE+INSERT

Install

pip install dbt-vertica

You don't need to install dbt separately. Installing dbt-vertica will also install dbt-core and vertica-python.

Sample Profile Configuration

your-profile:
  outputs:
    dev:
      type: vertica # Don't change this!
      host: vertica-host-name
      port: 5433 # or your custom port (optional)
      username: your-username
      password: your-password
      database: vertica-database-name
      schema: your-default-schema
  target: dev

By default, dbt-vertica will request ConnectionLoadBalance=true (which is generally a good thing), and set a session label of dbt_your-username.

There are three options for SSL: ssl, ssl_env_cafile, and ssl_uri. See their use in the code here.

Reach out!

First off, I would not have been able to make this adapater if the smart folks at dbt labs didn't make it so easy. That said, it seems every database has its own little quirks. I ran into several different issues when adapting the macros to Vertica. If you find something not working right, please open an issue (assuming it has to do with the adapter and not dbt itself).

Also, I would be excited to hear about anyone who is able to benefit from using dbt with Vertica. (Just open an issue to leave me a comment.)

Develop

Run a local Vertica instance like:

docker run -p 5433:5433 \
           -p 5444:5444 \
           -e VERTICA_DB_NAME=docker \
           -e VMART_ETL_SCRIPT="" \
           -e VMART_ETL_SQL="" \
           vertica/vertica-ce

Access the local Vertica instance like:

docker exec -it <docker_image_name> /opt/vertica/bin/vsql

You need the pytest dbt adapter:

pip3 install pytest-dbt-adapter==0.6.0

Run tests via:

pytest tests/integration.dbtspec
# run an individual test with increased logging:
pytest tests/integration.dbtspec::test_dbt_base -xs --ff