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dbt incremental unique_key silently dedupes during backfill

context

Running a dbt incremental model with a single-column unique_key and doing a multi-day historical backfill.

thoughts

dbt incremental materialization with a unique_key issues a MERGE on that key. During a backfill where multiple source rows share the same unique_key across days, only ONE row survives — not the latest-per-day as intuition suggests. The surviving row is backend-dependent: BigQuery dedupes with undefined order, Snowflake by row-scan order. Fix: use a compound key like ['id', 'event_date'], OR switch to incremental_strategy='insert_overwrite' with partition_by when the table is date-partitioned — that mode replaces whole partitions instead of merging on keys.

next time

Any incremental model with a single-column unique_key + a backfill plan — check whether the source has multiple rows per key across the backfill window. If yes, go compound key or insert_overwrite.

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