Incremental model with no data to merge

[trongle]

Hi all,
My team is using Fivetran and DBT to load/transform the data into Snowflake and we’re working on using incremental models.

What works:

• The initial load of the data works fine
• if there IS data to merge into Snowflake works fine

What fails:

• When there ISN’T any new data to merge then we get an error in Fivetran similar to below:

[0m20:49:18  Database Error in model develop_test_model (models/develop/misc/develop_test_model.sql)
e[0m20:49:18    001003 (42000): SQL compilation error:
e[0m20:49:18    syntax error line 19 at position 6 unexpected ')'.

Looking into the Snowflake query history it eventually errors on a query like this (please ignore line positions, i removed whitespaces):

create or replace temporary table WAREHOUSE.DATABASE.develop_test_model__dbt_tmp  as ( );

Is there a way to skip the incremental load process if there is no data to merge in?

Any help would be appreciated!

[joellabes]

Can you post the code of the incremental model you’re having trouble with?

Your code needs to be valid both when is_incremental() is true or false - it sounds like you have your entire model logic inside an if block. You should return no rows when a model has no changes, but there should still be sql.

[trongle]

you were correct. i did have everything in an if block so when it was evaluating what to put into the temporary table, there was nothing to put in there. i added an else statement that just returns 0 rows and that fixed the issue. thank you for the assistance!