Hi everyone! 😊 I'm new to the community and recently started using Elementary for our dbt pipeline. I have a question about optimizing tests. Our process runs every hour on dbt via a Snowpark container, but I'm considering running tests, anomaly detection, and volume alerts just once a day—after midnight—instead of every hour. Previously, I had

dbt build --select elementary

, which ran all the models. After switching to just

dbt build

, I noticed that some Elementary models are no longer running, but the test results are still being imported into the tables. Is there a way to run artifacts every hour while executing anomaly detection less frequently?

Hey Jelena, welcome! To check my understanding - you want to run your dbt pipeline every hour without any tests, and test it once every 24 hours. Correct? 🙂

Hey Noya, thanks for the reply, yes. I am trying something like this now just want to be sure that the data will be properly picked up for the tests

Got it, thank you! This is my suggestion: 1. Every hour:

dbt build --select tag:bronze --exclude tag:elementary-tests --target prod

. No changes, this will not run Elementary tests but will write run results to Elementary tables. 2. Once a day: •

dbt test --select tag:elementary-tests --target prod

- Will run tests over the existing tables •

edr report --days-back 1 --env prod

Let me know what you think 🙂

Aha okay, understood 🙂 Yeah I was not sure about the elementary tables, it makes sense yes. Will try it out and see how it goes for few runs. Thanks a lot Noya!

Great! Happy to help.

Thanks! I just have one more question for a clarification, please forgive me if it's already answered or if it's an obvious question 😅. When should we use --select elementary? Initially it creates the tables in the elementary schema yes, but when is it needed to be included in runs (upon version upgrades)?

This is a very good (and highly confusing) question! Elementary tables are being filled by on-run-end hooks, not by a regular

dbt run

. Because of that, you should use

--select elementary

only on your first Elementary set up, or after a version update in case there's a change in the Elementary table/schema structure.

Thank you Noya!

Hey Jelena, we added some clarification that should help with your question about

--select elementary

🙂