A Practical Guide to dbt Tests

If leadership loses trust in one dashboard, they stop trusting all of them. dbt tests are the cheapest insurance you can buy.

Start with the basics

unique and not_null on every primary key. They catch more bugs than anything clever.

Test relationships

Every foreign key should have a relationships test so orphaned rows fail the build.

Test the business rules

Custom tests like "revenue is never negative" encode what the business already believes.

Run them in CI

Tests that only run on someone's laptop are suggestions.