Incremental Model with the MERGE Strategy

Defining an incremental model

Tables come with one big issue: they don’t stay updated. To refresh the table, we need to run the dbt model. Every time we run a dbt model, it recreates the whole table. When dealing with large amounts of data, it can become very slow and ineffective.

Fortunately, there’s a third type of materialization that incrementally merges new rows with the existing table through an incremental strategy. This materialization requires that we enable billing on our BigQuery project (it can be done through the free trial).