Add information about defer & compile

[siljamardla]

What are you changing in this pull request and why?

Adding information about how defer and compile work together.
Stumbled upon this functionality and decided to document it for the benefit of others.

[welcome]

Hello!👋 Thanks for contributing to the dbt product documentation and opening this pull request! ✨
We use Markdown and some HTML to write the dbt product documentation. When writing content, you can use our style guide and content types to understand our writing standards and how we organize information in the dbt product docs.
We'll review your contribution and respond as soon as we can. 😄

[vercel]

The latest updates on your projects. Learn more about Vercel for Git ↗︎

Name	Status	Preview	Comments	Updated (UTC)
docs-getdbt-com	✅ Ready (Inspect)	Visit Preview	💬 Add feedback	Apr 9, 2024 2:58pm

[mirnawong1]

hey @siljamardla , thanks for opening this up! i'm going to work with the team internally with this and will revert back with more info! really appreciate your contributions ✨ !

[mirnawong1]

hey @siljamardla , can you provide more insight on your proposed changes? Wondering if you're experiencing this scenario where you have dev artifacts that dbt is favoring?

[siljamardla]

hey @siljamardla , can you provide more insight on your proposed changes? Wondering if you're experiencing this scenario where you have dev artifacts that dbt is favoring?

Will have to test again to be sure. But if you have tested and you're sure that defer also works with full compile, feel free to modify my PR. The main point is to make it known that defer also works with compile.

[siljamardla]

Hey @mirnawong1
Tested again.

• I dropped my dev schema
• I ran dbt compile --defer --state target/live (this is where I store the latest live manifest)
• Checked the compiled output. All the refs use my personal schema name.
• I recreated my dev schema. I checked that there are no tables in it.
• I ran dbt compile --defer --state target/live again
• Checked the compiled output, again all the refs use my personal schema name.
• I ran dbt compile --defer --state target/live --select my_model_name > target/tmp_my_model_name.sql
• Checked the output, in this one all the refs have been compiled to use the live schema names
• Just in case, I deleted my target folder and went through the same routine again, still the same outcome

Thus, I stand by the claim that defer does not work on dbt compile, but it does work when you compile something specific.

[siljamardla]

@mirnawong1, even if you plan to investigate and/or fix anything, I think it's valuable information that should be added to the docs meanwhile.

[mirnawong1]

Thanks so much @siljamardla ! Will take a look at this tomorrow and also would like to cc @dave-connors-3 as well!

[dave-connors-3]

@mirnawong1 @siljamardla hello there! i definitely believe this to be unintended behavior, and should go through core support, and not land in the docs site until we get a bit more clarity into what's going on!

@siljamardla, would you be willing to open up an issue on dbt-core, and document the steps you showed above? If i end up mistaken (which happens a whole lot!) we can come back here and update the docs accordingly

[mirnawong1]

hey @siljamardla , thank for your patience here! I've had a chat with @dave-connors-3 and this sounds like unintended behavior and possibly a bug. could you please open a core issue for the team to look at?

appreciate your insight and looking forward to your future docs contributions ✨! thank you as well @dave-connors-3 !

[mirnawong1]

i'll close this pr out and happy to reopen at a later point. thanks again!

[siljamardla]

As suggested, I've created an issue:
dbt-labs/dbt-core#9991