Project recommendations

dbt Explorer provides recommendations about your project from the dbt_project_evaluator package using metadata from the Discovery API.

• Explorer also offers a global view, showing all the recommendations across the project for easy sorting and summarizing.
• These recommendations provide insight into how you can create a better-documented, better-tested, and better-built dbt project, creating more trust and less confusion.
• For a seamless and consistent experience, recommendations use dbt_project_evaluator's pre-defined settings and don't import customizations applied to your package or project.

On-demand learning

If you enjoy video courses, check out our dbt Explorer on-demand course and learn how to best explore your dbt project(s)!

Recommendations page

The Recommendations overview page includes two top-level metrics measuring the test and documentation coverage of the models in your project.

• Model test coverage — The percent of models in your project (models not from a package or imported via dbt Mesh) with at least one dbt test configured on them.
• Model documentation coverage — The percent of models in your project (models not from a package or imported via dbt Mesh) with a description.

Example of the Recommendations overview page with project metrics and the recommendations for all resources in the project

List of rules

The following table lists the rules currently defined in the dbt_project_evaluator package.

Category	Name	Description	Package Docs Link
Modeling	Direct Join to Source	Model that joins both a model and source, indicating a missing staging model	GitHub
Modeling	Duplicate Sources	More than one source node corresponds to the same data warehouse relation	GitHub
Modeling	Multiple Sources Joined	Models with more than one source parent, indicating lack of staging models	GitHub
Modeling	Root Model	Models with no parents, indicating potential hardcoded references and need for sources	GitHub
Modeling	Source Fanout	Sources with more than one model child, indicating a need for staging models	GitHub
Modeling	Unused Source	Sources that are not referenced by any resource	GitHub
Performance	Exposure Dependent on View	Exposures with at least one model parent materialized as a view, indicating potential query performance issues	GitHub
Testing	Missing Primary Key Test	Models with insufficient testing on the grain of the model.	GitHub
Documentation	Undocumented Models	Models without a model-level description	GitHub
Documentation	Undocumented Source	Sources (collections of source tables) without descriptions	GitHub
Documentation	Undocumented Source Tables	Source tables without descriptions	GitHub
Governance	Public Model Missing Contract	Models with public access that do not have a model contract to ensure the data types	GitHub

The Recommendations tab

Models, sources, and exposures each also have a Recommendations tab on their resource details page, with the specific recommendations that correspond to that resource:

Example of the Recommendations tab