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New Adapter Information Sheet

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Drew Banin edited this page Oct 24, 2018 · 3 revisions

New Adapter Information Sheet

The following questions are intended to provide information about a warehouse, for use in building a new dbt adapter. Different data warehouses have pretty different semantics, so some of these questions may be more applicable than others. Where possible, please provide as much detail as you can!

Please copy this questionnaire to a GitHub gist, then fill out answers to the questions to the best of your ability. Where you're done, please post a link to the public gist in the relevant issue. If the issue does not already exist, please create it first.

Questions

  1. What options are there for connecting to the warehouse? Eg: ODBC, a python module, etc

  2. Is there a consensus around which of the options in #1 is the most featureful/best supported/most mature/etc option?

  3. Does the warehouse support namespaces/schemas/datasets (or similar)?

  4. Can schemas/namespaces be created using SQL? Eg: create schema my_schema

  5. Does the warehouse support logical databases?

  6. Does the warehouse support standard-ish SQL? Are there any noteworthy caveats?

  7. Are transactions supported?

  8. Can tables be created with create table schema.table as (...)?

  9. Can views be created with create view schema.view as (...)?

  10. Can tables/views be renamed with alter table {table_name} rename to {new_name}?

  11. Does the warehouse support insert statements? Any caveats?

  12. Does the warehouse support delete statements? Any caveats?

  13. Does the warehouse support update statements? Any caveats?

  14. Does the warehouse support merge statements? Any caveats?

  15. Does the warehouse support drop table/drop view statements? Any caveats?

  16. Does the warehouse support truncate statements? Any caveats?

  17. Does the warehouse support temporary tables? Any caveats?

  18. Can queries be cancelled?

  19. Are views bound to the relations they select from? Ie. do drop table statements require a ...cascade argument?

  20. Does the warehouse support querying for existing relations (ie. their existence and type)? Is this via an API call or a SELECT statement? Eg: select * from information_schema.tables.

  21. Does the warehouse support querying for the the columns in a relation? Is this via an API call or a SELECT statement? Eg: select * from information_schema.columns

  22. Can columns be added and removed using DDL? Eg: alter table add column <name> <type>?

  23. Does the warehouse support non-standard performance configurations? Ie. clustering, partitioning, sort/dist keys, etc. What are they, and how are they used? Can they be supplied in create table as statements?

  24. Which column types does the warehouse support? Are text types varchars (with sizes) or unsized string columns? Are numeric types (with fixed precision) supported? Is there a different type for timestamps with timezones? Any caveats?

  25. Does the warehouse support column-level constraints (eg. unique, not null, foreign key, primary key)? Are they enforced? Can they be defined in create table as statements?

  26. Are there other noteworthy quirks/features of the warehouse that have not been specified above? If so: please enumerate them here!

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