dbt Essentials cheat sheet with Shrividya Hegde

The parts of dbt you look up mid-build, condensed to two pages.

Inside:

• Project anatomy, ref() and source(), and a diagram showing why the ref graph is your run order
• Environments and targets, so dev builds never touch prod
• All five materializations with a rule of thumb for when to promote between them
• Incremental models: the is_incremental() pattern, strategy comparison, and the on_schema_change default that silently drops new columns
• Microbatch (1.9+) for event tables too large for one query
• Generic, singular, and unit tests
• Snapshots for SCD-2, including YAML-defined snapshots
• Jinja and macros, plus node selectors like state:modified+ that make CI fast

Ends with gotchas, including why dbt build beats running dbt run and dbt test separately.