fix: preserve dbt tests and relationships for quoted columns

[dafyy321-pixel]

Summary

Preserve dbt test metadata and relationships when test artifacts contain SQL-quoted column identifiers. The importer now resolves those identifiers using the adapter dialect, while retaining exact physical-name matching, and generates valid join conditions for the recovered special column names.

Fixes #2809.

What failure does this repair?

A dbt project with a valid quote: true column can import successfully while losing its tested primary key, nullability constraint, and relationship. The failure was reproduced on main at caa23acadff17b68b0d4367be4a94238635c7dae using actual dbt-core 1.12.6/dbt-duckdb 1.11.0 artifacts, rather than inferred from parser behavior.

The minimal project uses profile: review_dbt and materializes its models as tables:

# dbt_project.yml
name: review_dbt
version: "1.0"
config-version: 2
profile: review_dbt
models:
  review_dbt:
    +materialized: table

# profiles.yml
review_dbt:
  target: dev
  outputs:
    dev:
      type: duckdb
      path: warehouse.db
      threads: 1

Its two SQL models are:

-- models/dim_customers.sql
select 1 as "customer-id", 'Alice' as name

-- models/fct_orders.sql
select 11 as id, 1 as "customer-id", 20 as amount

The tests explicitly quote the physical column and the relationship target:

# models/schema.yml
version: 2
models:
  - name: dim_customers
    columns:
      - name: customer-id
        quote: true
        data_tests:
          - unique
          - not_null
  - name: fct_orders
    columns:
      - name: customer-id
        quote: true
        data_tests:
          - relationships:
              arguments:
                to: ref('dim_customers')
                field: '"customer-id"'

From that project directory, the reproduction runs:

dbt build --project-dir . --profiles-dir .
dbt docs generate --project-dir . --profiles-dir .
wren context import dbt --project-dir . --profiles-path profiles.yml --path ../wren-quoted-repro
wren context validate --path ../wren-quoted-repro
wren context build --path ../wren-quoted-repro

The actual dbt build reports PASS=5 WARN=0 ERROR=0. Before this change, Wren reports 2 dbt models, 0 sources, 0 relationships. models/dim_customers/metadata.yml has no primary_key, its tested column remains not_null: false, and its test properties are absent. Wren validation reports zero errors, with only two missing-description warnings, and the build succeeds. There is no thrown error to paste: the failure is silent loss of information in the generated files.

The cause is the contract between the two dbt artifacts. The manifest's test node stores column_name as the string "customer-id", including SQL quotes; the catalog stores the physical name customer-id. _apply_dbt_test_enrichment passed the former straight to _find_column, whose exact comparison could never match the latter. The enrichment block did not run, and primary-key inference subsequently had no recorded not_null/unique tests. Test events were still collected separately, so generated rules could describe constraints absent from the model metadata.

An otherwise equivalent real dbt control using ordinary customer_id imports one relationship, primary_key: customer_id, not_null: true, and verified test properties. With this patch, the quoted project retains the corresponding customer-id metadata too. This restores the documented dbt mappings and the verified key/join information available to consumers of the generated context.

The code change stays within the Python importer. _find_column first preserves the existing exact catalog-name lookup. Only after that fails does it tokenize the name with the manifest adapter's SQLGlot dialect and accept a single quoted identifier token. That decodes escaped delimiters without stripping arbitrary characters, folding case, or interpreting a SQL expression as a column name. Existing adapter-to-dialect mappings are reused; no parser dependency is added.

The relationship target's field is resolved through the same lookup. This matters because recovering the relationship exposes the physical customer-id names on both sides. _ensure_relationship now constructs the equality with SQLGlot column expressions, yielding:

fct_orders."customer-id" = dim_customers."customer-id"

Ordinary names retain the existing output, such as orders.customer_id = customers.id. This avoids recovering a relationship whose condition would interpret a hyphenated column as subtraction.

Relationship creation also requires the target field to resolve to an imported catalog column. A missing target is left as an unresolved test event, rather than being passed to the join builder as a quoted fallback. This preserves the source test evidence while preventing an invalid relationship and a misleading verified-join rule.

How is it tested?

The new tests live in core/wren/tests/unit/test_dbt.py, which runs in the default service-free unit job. The captured fixture contains trimmed manifest.json, catalog.json, and run_results.json from the real successful dbt build/docs generation above; its README records their provenance. CI does not need dbt installed or a database service to consume them.

There are 13 added cases:

• test_import_preserves_quoted_column_tests calls the actual convert_dbt_project_to_wren_project, checks primary key/nullability/verified test properties and the recovered relationship, parses its condition, and executes that generated condition against in-memory DuckDB tables. Before the source change, it fails with KeyError: 'primary_key'.
• test_import_skips_relationship_with_missing_target_column removes the physical target column from the captured catalog while keeping the manifest test and the target model's other catalog column. It calls the actual converter and checks that no relationship or verified-join rule is emitted, then verifies that all three dbt test events are retained and that the unresolved relationship event has no resolved target fields. The original implementation emitted a relationship whose target was dim_customers."""customer-id"""; the regression now produces an empty relationship list.
• Four test_find_quoted_column cases exercise _find_column with a mixed-case quoted name, escaped double quote, escaped MySQL backtick, and escaped TSQL closing bracket.
• test_find_column_prefers_exact_catalog_name protects physical names containing literal quote characters.
• test_unquoted_columns_keep_existing_relationship_condition exercises both _find_column and _ensure_relationship and checks ordinary output compatibility.
• Five test_find_column_does_not_reinterpret_other_sql cases cover case differences, string literals, qualified expressions, and malformed quoting.

All 13 added regression cases pass locally, including both the recovered quoted-column join and the missing-target control. The complete focused file has 41 passing tests in the local Windows environment. Ruff 0.15.6 checks, formatting checks, and git diff --check pass for the changed Python files. The complete GitHub Actions SDK workflow also passed at 223781645a6c6cc0c5160a0a352c7d56f2838233, including the default unit selection, connector jobs, MCP tests, both memory configurations, embedding backend parity, and UI tests. The hosted lint and PR-title checks passed on the same revision.

Duplicate check

The relevant public overlap is the open #2779, whose current diff changes env_var filter/cast handling near the top of dbt.py. This patch changes column enrichment, lookup, and relationship construction instead. The open #1858 changes relationship quoting in the legacy UI's mdlBuilder.ts. Merged #1984 concerns condition quoting in the previous Go converter under wren-launcher. Neither repairs the current Python lookup between manifest and catalog names. The current Python importer was introduced in #2279. These PR diffs and the relevant public discussion were checked before submission; the neighboring legacy and environment-variable work was kept separate.

The checked public issues and open PRs did not contain a matching fix for this quoted test-column metadata loss. This statement is limited to the public work inspected; it does not assume anything about unpublished work.

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed dbt imports for models with quoted column names containing hyphens. Primary keys and test metadata are now preserved, and relationship conditions correctly reference those columns.
  • Improved quoted column matching across DuckDB, MySQL, and T-SQL dialects while preserving exact-name matches, helping imported relationships work as expected in queries and joins.
  • Relationships are now skipped when the referenced target column cannot be matched, preventing invalid relationship conditions.

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• core/wren/src/wren/dbt.py
• core/wren/tests/unit/test_dbt.py

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Walkthrough

The dbt importer now resolves quoted test column names using the manifest dialect. It requires relationship target columns to resolve and builds relationship conditions from SQLGlot expressions. A DuckDB fixture and tests cover quoted-column metadata and relationships.

Changes

Quoted dbt column enrichment

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Dialect-aware matching and relationship rendering core/wren/src/wren/dbt.py	Test enrichment uses the manifest dialect for column lookup. Lookup preserves exact-name matches, then matches a single identifier token. Relationship enrichment requires a resolved target column and builds conditions from SQLGlot expressions.
Quoted-column fixtures and import tests core/wren/tests/fixtures/dbt/quoted_columns/*, core/wren/tests/unit/test_dbt.py	The DuckDB fixture defines two models with quoted customer-id columns and three tests. Tests cover imported metadata, primary-key inference, relationship conditions, join execution, dialect-specific lookup, and rejected inputs.

Priority: ➖ Normal

Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes

Change: Bug fix · Severity of issue fixed: Medium

Suggested reviewers: inaboishchikov

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 22378

The change preserves dbt tests and relationships for quoted columns and skips relationships whose target column is missing. No remaining merge-blocking risk was identified.

Pre-merge checks: 5

Check name	Status	Explanation
Linked Issues check		Issue #2809 requires quoted dbt columns to retain not_null, unique, inferred primary-key metadata, verified test properties, and relationships. The supplied change summary reports exact-name prece…
Out of Scope Changes check		The supplied change summary limits production changes to the Python dbt importer. The fixture, provenance documentation, and focused tests directly support issue #2809. The summary identifies no unrel…
Docstring Coverage		Docstring coverage is 81.82% which is sufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 11 functions across 2 files.
Title check		The title clearly and concisely identifies the primary change: preserving dbt tests and relationships for quoted columns.
Description check		The description includes all required sections, gives a reproducible failure scenario with observed output, explains the fix, documents comprehensive testing, and records the duplicate check.

Full details: Linked Issues check

Explanation

Issue #2809 requires quoted dbt columns to retain not_null, unique, inferred primary-key metadata, verified test properties, and relationships. The supplied change summary reports exact-name precedence, dialect-aware decoding of one quoted identifier, and use of this lookup for test enrichment and relationship fields. It also reports SQLGlot column expressions for correctly quoted join conditions. The added fixture and 12 regression cases cover import metadata, relationship recovery, SQL parsing, and DuckDB execution. The repository diff was unavailable, so this conclusion uses the supplied PR evidence.

Full details: Out of Scope Changes check

Explanation

The supplied change summary limits production changes to the Python dbt importer. The fixture, provenance documentation, and focused tests directly support issue #2809. The summary identifies no unrelated production behavior or unrelated test scope.

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Actionable comments posted: 1

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• 🪄 Fix comments: Fix CodeRabbit comments on this PR

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Inline comments:
Review comments at @core/wren/src/wren/dbt.py:
- Around line 842-846: In the relationship-processing flow, guard calls to
_ensure_relationship and assignments to relationship event fields with a
successful _find_column lookup. Only use the resolved column name as
target_field; skip creating the relationship when the target column is absent.

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• core/wren/src/wren/dbt.py
• core/wren/tests/fixtures/dbt/quoted_columns/README.md
• core/wren/tests/fixtures/dbt/quoted_columns/catalog.json
• core/wren/tests/fixtures/dbt/quoted_columns/manifest.json
• core/wren/tests/fixtures/dbt/quoted_columns/run_results.json
• core/wren/tests/unit/test_dbt.py

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