Understanding Sources

[mikej345]

Hi,

I’m working my way through the dbt fundamentals course and I’m having a little difficulty with sources ymls.

I’m using Databricks Unity Catalog.

Within the sources yml there is a Name property and also a schema property.

When do you know which one you should reference in a source{{}} call?

There doesn’t appear to be a clear rhyme or reason within the tutorial quiz. Sometimes they use name, sometimes they use schema, even though they always declare both properties but obviously I’m just misunderstanding something.

[DataNath]

Hey @mikej345, in the {{source()}} macro you always use the name. From the docs:

By default, schema will be the same as name . Add schema only if you want to use a source name that differs from the existing schema.

I believe in their examples, the name/schema are always the same. However, you could change the name to something different like:

version: 2

sources:
  - name: my_sources_name -- Changed from jaffle_shop
    database: raw  
    schema: jaffle_shop  
    tables:
      - name: orders
      - name: customers

  - name: stripe
    tables:
      - name: payments

And in your models, use:
{{source('my_sources_name','orders')}}

Which would compile to:
raw.jaffle_shop.orders