[Feature] make staging log model an append-strategy incremental table

[fivetran-jamie]

Is there an existing feature request for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Describe the Feature

Add logic to stg_fivetran__log to make it an incremental model. Since past records should not change at all once they are inserted, an append strategy would work great here and hopefully limit runtime a bunch!

Describe alternatives you've considered

• keep it non-incremental
  • the log table can get super big and unwieldy
• use another incremental strategy:
  • too complicated for what we need, though we need to be very careful to not insert duplicate records

Are you interested in contributing this feature?

• Yes.
• Yes, but I will need assistance and will schedule time during your office hours for guidance.
• No.

Anything else?

No response

[fivetran-edkoo]

I have a Fivetran customer who is using our Fivetran Platform models but is seeing large costs in their BQ destination due to Fivetran log processing. They say

"I'm not sure which specific [query] may be responsible but looking at the BigQuery job logs directly I can see these three queries account for around $400 of that. These are the queries that start with the headers of:

/* {"app": "dbt", "dbt_version": "1.3.1", "profile_name": "fivetran", "target_name": "prod", "node_id": "model.fivetran_log.stg_fivetran_log__log"} /
/ {"app": "dbt", "dbt_version": "1.3.1", "profile_name": "fivetran", "target_name": "prod", "node_id": "model.fivetran_log.fivetran_log__connector_status"} /
/ {"app": "dbt", "dbt_version": "1.3.1", "profile_name": "fivetran", "target_name": "prod", "node_id": "model.fivetran_log.fivetran_log__schema_changelog"} */

I think primarily this all comes back to the source Fivetran log table (in BigQuery) being > 200 GB in size and the queries in these models reading all that data on every run, rather than perhaps just the past couple of days worth. I see a lot of tables being fully rebuilt every time."

Would this PR address this issue and help reduce the cost of processing the staging tables of the Fivetran Platform package?

[fivetran-catfritz]

@fivetran-joemarkiewicz bumping this issue following our discussion on performance for this package and also based on my work on #126. stg_fivetran_log__log and the downstreams would make sense to make incremental, though probably not append strategy.