Glossary

Template: Managing Datawarehouse objects on multiple environments and databases are one of the significant uses of the CI/CD solution of Acheron. But these objects may vary for each environment or each database or object kind. But apart from some few parameters, all other SQL will be the same.

Creating static SQL for each of these objects is not an efficient solution. And It will take a lot more time and every time a new environment or database is added you will have to add more SQL code. So if there is an efficient way to manage these dynamic values it would be beneficial. This is where ADM templates come into play.

A template in ADM is a file which contains all your object parameters, but the dynamic values are given as variables. During the templating execution, depending on the conditions like which environment you are using, the variables will be replaced with the relevant values.

You can do much more than replacing the variables though. You can have conditional statements, loops, etc.

The template files will have the .j2 extension, and the variables in a template file will be denoted by the double curly braces, ‘{{ variables }}’.
Template-configuration: A YAML/JSON file that holds a reference to a template together with the variables required to render the Template to SQL.
DTAP: An abbreviation for the four deployment environments Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production.
AAA: The Arrange, Act and Assert pattern suggests that a test method should be created in three sections: arrange, act and assert. Each one of them only responsible for the part in which they are named after. In the Arrange section, the prerequisites for the Act fase are setup and validated. The Act section changes state. The Assert section compares the resulting state with the expected state. More background information can be found here.