It seems like there’s a “bug” in dealing with ephemeral dbt models as assets. These don’t get materialized per se, but are still part of the asset catalog in dagster when loaded with

load_assets_from_dbt_project

, causing all downstream assets to get the flag “Upstream changed”. Attached is a screenshot with an example. The stg_ prefix denotes an ephemeral model.

hi @Vinnie! Thanks for the report, this does seem like an oversight. At a high level, it feels like the ephemeral models should probably not even show up in the asset graph at all (as they cannot be materialized in any meaningful way) -- does that match your expectations?

Correct, as they’re often used as a substitute for CTEs (at least in my team), I’d expect them to not be part of the asset graph. On a slightly unrelated note, it would also be really good if we could also pass models to exclude in the

load_assets_from_dbt_project

function. Currently we can only pass the models to be selected.

hi @Vinnie! I filed an issue for this behavior: https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/issues/8771. I'll investigate this a bit more to get an estimate of when it can be merged, but I'm guessing this can get in within a week or two

thanks @owen! take your time, I’m leaving my job tomorrow and will only “bother” you guys again from a different slack account once i start my new role in august 🙂 I’m sure my team will appreciate to know though Actually thinking of this, would the exclude flag be a priority for you guys or do you have a bit more time to wait for it? I’m thinking of trying my hand at a PR since I’ll have a few weeks off and would like to start collaborating. Sounds like a simple enough issue from what I’ve already read the dagster-dbt codebase. Just can’t promise I’d finish it next week, wanna take some time to rest too

hi @Vinnie! best of luck with the new role 🙂. I believe you're right that this would be a pretty simple PR. I have a backlog of dagster-dbt issues that I was planning on burning down for next week, but it's definitely something that can wait a couple weeks if you're interested in contributing!

Oh don’t let me keep you from it then, I’ll look for something else I can contribute to when I get to it.