feat: Auto schema evolution revisited - #9799
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August 12, 2026 07:53
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Revisiting an old feature that allow automatic schema evolution. Our current approach of ingesting data in a new table for partition overwrite and merge strategy makes it much easier to implement now. Thus it is only supported for
partition_overwriteandmergestrategy based incremental ingestion(ideally we should just removeappendstrategy but that is discussion for some other issue/alternatively we can modify append strategy to also ingest data in a temporary table first).This will avoid complicated
pre_execstatements that we need to do that which should also ensure that full rebuild can still be supported.Three strategies are implemented:
Note: The implementation is similar to dbt's schema evolution approach but we avoid adding sync_all_columns strategy which also alter data types. It has several nuances which dbt also misses like datatype detected to a narrower datatype than source data, whether auto conversion to string should be allowed, whether we should let duckdb do lossy conversion like timestamp to date type etc. This can be revisited to only allow wider datatype conversions.
Future improvements:
sync_all_columnsstrategy as detailed in note above.Checklist: