Use the --empty flag for unit testing incremental models that don't yet exist

[dbeatty10]

Contributions

• I have read the contribution docs, and understand what's expected of me.

Link to the page on docs.getdbt.com requiring updates

https://docs.getdbt.com/docs/build/unit-tests#unit-testing-incremental-models

What part(s) of the page would you like to see updated?

Add the caveat that incremental models need to exist in the database first before running unit tests or doing a dbt build. So our recommendation is to do something like this to make sure all the incremental tables exist first:

dbt run --select "config.materialized:incremental" --empty

Additional information

See dbt-labs/dbt-core#10695

See also:

• https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/commands/run#the---empty-flag
• https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/commands/build#the---empty-flag
• https://docs.getdbt.com/docs/build/unit-tests#:~:text=This%20enables%20you%20to%20write%20succinct%20and%C2%A0specific%C2%A0unit%20tests.