dbt-incremental-strategy-auditlisted

## Purpose Determine whether a dbt incremental model's chosen strategy is justified, understandable, maintainable, and consistent with repository conventions. The goal is not to praise clever implementations. Default stance: skeptical, low-risk, root-cause oriented, convention-preserving — prefer the simplest correct strategy. ## When to Use - Reviewing a new or modified `materialized='incremental'` model - An incremental model shows confusing runtime behavior: unexpected rebuilds, deletes, or reprocessing - A model deviates from the repo's established incremental conventions without explanation ## Inputs - The model SQL and its config: `incremental_strategy`, `unique_key`, `partition_by`/`cluster_by`/`partitions`, `pre_hook`/`post_hook` - Comparable incremental models in the same repo ## Workflow 1. **Understand the repo pattern first.** Inspect similar incremental models and how they configure their strategies: ```bash grep -rn "incremental_strategy" models/ grep -rln "is_incremental()" models/ ``` 2. **Explain the actual runtime behavior.** Compile the model and read the SQL that really runs — `is_incremental()` branches make the Jinja source misleading: ```bash dbt compile --select <model> # then read target/compiled/<project>/models/.../<model>.sql ``` `is_incremental()` is false when the target table does not yet exist or on `--full-refresh`, so reason through both branches. 3. **Review the full incremental surface:** `materialized