agentmods.dev

207-dbt-incremental-loading-patterns

A set of patterns for making dbt data loads incremental, meaning they process new or changed data instead of rebuilding everything each time. It covers timestamps, backfills, partitions, and refresh strategies.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing incremental dbt models, adding lookback or backfill windows, choosing merge or insert-overwrite behavior, and handling partitioned warehouse tables.
Why use it?
It helps avoid missed updates, handle late-arriving records, reduce unnecessary processing, and refresh only the affected data.

Cursor rule

2 1y ago A scan 0 tokens original MIT
View the source file hamzaamjad/cursor-rules
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/hamzaamjad/cursor-rules/207-dbt-incremental-loading-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hamzaamjad/cursor-rules
Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 315 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.00315
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00158
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00063
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00032

Measured 2d ago against content hash c1efe614990a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

207-dbt-incremental-loading-patterns scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

rules/200-domain/207-dbt-incremental-loading-patterns.mdc · 37 lines

What it actually says

dbt-incremental-loading-patterns

Purpose: Ensure reliable and performant incremental loads in dbt models.

1. Multi-Timestamp Tracking

  • Track all relevant timestamps (e.g., created_at, updated_at, related entities) to avoid missed updates.
  • Example filter: 
    WHERE
  orders.created_at > (SELECT MAX(created_at) FROM {{ this }})
  OR orders.updated_at > (SELECT MAX(updated_at) FROM {{ this }})

2. Time-Window Backfill

  • Support variable backfill windows via vars, e.g. backfill_days.
  • Use conditional logic to backfill a recent window without full refresh.

3. Incremental Predicates

  • Use incremental_predicates for database-driven merge conditions.

4. Conditional Full Refresh

  • Toggle between table and incremental based on a force_refresh var.

5. Partitioned Incremental Models

  • Combine clustering/partitioning with incremental filters for large tables (Snowflake/BigQuery).

6. Insert-Overwrite Strategy

  • Use insert_overwrite for partition-level refreshes in supported warehouses.

7. Lookback Window

  • Reprocess recent partitions via a configurable lookback window to catch late-arriving data.

References: knowledge_base/data_modeling/dbt/incremental_loading_patterns.md

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 37 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A c1efe614990a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

207-dbt-incremental-loading-patterns is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository hamzaamjad/cursor-rules (2 stars, last pushed 1y ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 315 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Analytics and metricsDatabases
Related

Other cursor rules, from other repositories

angular-20

This rule provides comprehensive best practices and coding standards for Angular development, focusing on modern TypeScript, standalone components, signals, and performance optimizations.

angular/angular · 0 tokens

dev-standard

Apache Superset development standards and guidelines for Cursor IDE.

apache/superset · 1,147 tokens

cli-error-handling

CLI command error handling patterns.

prisma/orm · 0 tokens

prefer-direct-imports-over-module-mocks

Prefer extracting a testable core over vi.mock / vi.resetModules when unit tests need to reach production logic entangled with config, env, or singletons.

prisma/orm · 0 tokens

control-plane-descriptors

Control plane descriptor and instance implementation patterns.

prisma/orm · 0 tokens

family-instance-domain-actions

Family instance domain action implementation patterns.

prisma/orm · 0 tokens