Upgrading to v0.21

Unsupported version

dbt Core v0.21 has reached the end of critical support. No new patch versions will be released, and it will stop running in dbt Cloud on June 30, 2022. Read "About dbt Core versions" for more details.

Resources

• Discourse
• Release notes
• Full changelog

Breaking changes

• dbt source snapshot-freshness has been renamed to dbt source freshness. Its node selection logic is now consistent with other tasks. In order to check freshness for a specific source, you must prefix it with source:.
• Snowflake: Turn off transactions and turn on autocommit by default. Within dbt materializations, wrap DML statements in explicit begin and commit. Note that it is not recommended to run DML statements outside of dbt materialization logic. If you do this, despite our recommendation, you will need to wrap those statements in explicit begin and commit. Note also that this may affect user-space code that depends on transactions, such as pre-hooks and post-hooks that specify transaction: true or transaction: false. We recommend removing those references to transactions.
• Artifacts:
  • manifest.json uses a v3 schema that includes additional node properties (no changes to existing properties)
  • run_results.json uses a v3 schema that has added skipped as a potential TestResult
  • sources.json has a new v2 schema that has added timing and thread details

New and changed documentation

Tasks

• Commands, build, rpc: Add dbt build
• Commands: source: Renamed to dbt source freshness.
• deps: Add dbt deps logging for outdated packages
• list: Add --output-keys flag and RPC parameter

Selection

• Commands: source: Updated selection logic to match other tasks. When selecting a specific source to check freshness, you must prefix it with source:.
• Node selection syntax, commands: Switch --models for --select across the board. (Commands which previously used the --models flag still support it for backwards compatibility.)
• YAML selectors now support an optional default property. If set, dbt will use custom selection criteria for commands that do not specify their own selection/exclusion flags.
• Selection methods and state comparison caveats: Add state:modified subselectors, and reflect that it now includes changes to upstream macros.
• Test selection examples includes more discussion of indirect selection (a change in v0.20), and the optional "greedy" flag/property (new in v0.21), which you can optionally set to include tests that have a mix of selected + unselected parents

Elsewhere in Core

• Resource configs and properties docs have been consolidated and reconciled. New config property that makes it possible to configure models, seeds, snapshots, and tests in all YAML files.
• Configuring incremental models: New optional configuration for incremental models, on_schema_change.
• Environment variables: Add a log-scrubbing prefix, DBT_ENV_SECRET_
• Test where config has been reimplemented as a macro (get_where_subquery) that you can optionally reimplement, too
• dispatch now supports reimplementing global macros residing in the dbt macro namespace with versions from installed packages, by leveraging search_order in the dispatch project config

Plugins

• Postgres profile property connect_timeout now configurable. Also applicable to child plugins (e.g. dbt-redshift)
• Redshift: profile property ra3_node: true to support cross-database source definitions and read-only querying
• BigQuery: profile property execution_project now configurable. Snapshots support target_project and target_dataset config aliases.