Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Adding new context method local_md5 for v1.4 #2658

Merged
merged 12 commits into from
Jan 11, 2023
18 changes: 18 additions & 0 deletions website/docs/reference/dbt-jinja-functions/local-md5.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
---
title: "local_md5"
id: "local_md5"
---

The `local_md5` context variable calculates an [MD5 hash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5) of the given string. The string `local_md5` emphasizes that the hash is calculated _locally_, in the dbt-Jinja context. This variable is typically useful for advanced use cases. For example, when you generate unique identifiers within custom materialization or operational logic, you can either avoid collisions between temporary relations or identify changes by comparing checksums.

It is different than the `md5` SQL function, supported by many SQL dialects, which runs remotely in the data platform. You want to always use SQL hashing functions when generating <Term id="surrogate-key">surrogate keys</Term>.

Usage:
```sql
-- source
{%- set value_hash = local_md5("hello world") -%}
'{{ value_hash }}'

-- compiled
'5eb63bbbe01eeed093cb22bb8f5acdc3'
```