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Infer setup

Vendor-supported plugin

Certain core functionality may vary. If you would like to report a bug, request a feature, or contribute, you can check out the linked repository and open an issue.

  • Maintained by: Infer
  • Authors: Erik Mathiesen-Dreyfus, Ryan Garland
  • GitHub repo: inferlabs/dbt-infer
  • PyPI package: dbt-infer
  • Slack channel: n/a
  • Supported dbt Core version: v1.2.0 and newer
  • dbt Cloud support: Not Supported
  • Minimum data platform version: n/a

Installing dbt-infer

Use pip to install the adapter. Before 1.8, installing the adapter would automatically install dbt-core and any additional dependencies. Beginning in 1.8, installing an adapter does not automatically install dbt-core. This is because adapters and dbt Core versions have been decoupled from each other so we no longer want to overwrite existing dbt-core installations. Use the following command for installation:

Configuring dbt-infer

For Infer-specific configuration, please refer to Infer configs.

Connecting to Infer with dbt-infer​

Infer allows you to perform advanced ML Analytics within SQL as if native to your data warehouse. To do this Infer uses a variant called SQL-inf, which defines as set of primitive ML commands from which you can build advanced analysis for any business use case. Read more about SQL-inf and Infer in the Infer documentation.

The dbt-infer package allow you to use SQL-inf easily within your DBT models. You can read more about the dbt-infer package itself and how it connects to Infer in the dbt-infer documentation.

The dbt-infer adapter is maintained via PyPi and installed with pip. To install the latest dbt-infer package simply run the following within the same shell as you run dbt.

pip install dbt-infer

Versioning of dbt-infer follows the standard dbt versioning scheme - meaning if you are using dbt 1.2 the corresponding dbt-infer will be named 1.2.x where is the latest minor version number.

Before using SQL-inf in your DBT models you need to setup an Infer account and generate an API-key for the connection. You can read how to do that in the Getting Started Guide.

The profile configuration in profiles.yml for dbt-infer should look something like this:

~/.dbt/profiles.yml
<profile-name>:
  target: <target-name>
  outputs:
    <target-name>:
      type: infer
      url: "<infer-api-endpoint>"
      username: "<infer-api-username>"
      apikey: "<infer-apikey>"
      data_config:
        [configuration for your underlying data warehouse]

Note that you need to also have installed the adapter package for your underlying data warehouse. For example, if your data warehouse is BigQuery then you need to also have installed the appropriate dbt-bigquery package. The configuration of this goes into the data_config field.

Description of Infer Profile Fields​

FieldRequiredDescription
typeYesMust be set to infer. This must be included either in profiles.yml or in the dbt_project.yml file.
urlYesThe host name of the Infer server to connect to. Typically this is https://app.getinfer.io.
usernameYesYour Infer username - the one you use to login.
apikeyYesYour Infer api key.
data_configYesThe configuration for your underlying data warehouse. The format of this follows the format of the configuration for your data warehouse adapter.

Example of Infer configuration​

To illustrate the above descriptions, here is an example of what a dbt-infer configuration might look like. In this case the underlying data warehouse is BigQuery, which we configure the adapter for inside the data_config field.

infer_bigquery:
  apikey: 1234567890abcdef
  username: my_name@example.com
  url: https://app.getinfer.io
  type: infer
  data_config:
    dataset: my_dataset
    job_execution_timeout_seconds: 300
    job_retries: 1
    keyfile: bq-user-creds.json
    location: EU
    method: service-account
    priority: interactive
    project: my-bigquery-project
    threads: 1
    type: bigquery

Usage​

You do not need to change anything in your existing DBT models when switching to use SQL-inf – they will all work the same as before – but you now have the ability to use SQL-inf commands as native SQL functions.

Infer supports a number of SQL-inf commands, including PREDICT, EXPLAIN, CLUSTER, SIMILAR_TO, TOPICS, SENTIMENT. You can read more about SQL-inf and the commands it supports in the SQL-inf Reference Guide.

To get you started we will give a brief example here of what such a model might look like. You can find other more complex examples in the dbt-infer examples repo.

In our simple example, we will show how to use a previous model 'user_features' to predict churn by predicting the column has_churned.

predict_user_churn.sql
{{
  config(
    materialized = "table"
  )
}}

with predict_user_churn_input as (
    select * from {{ ref('user_features') }}
)

SELECT * FROM predict_user_churn_input PREDICT(has_churned, ignore=user_id)

Not that we ignore user_id from the prediction. This is because we think that the user_id might, and should, not influence our prediction of churn, so we remove it. We also use the convention of pulling together the inputs for our prediction in a CTE, named predict_user_churn_input.

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