How can I stop or change the order of my PDT builds?

[sam8]

Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Feb 2021

Problem

I have several PDTs building, and I want to either:

• Pause a PDT from building

• Control the order of my PDT builds (maybe I want a certain one to always build first)

Explanation

The order of PDT builds is arbitrary except when dependencies are involved. So there isn't any UI for pausing a PDT or changing the order of PDT builds (here's a feature request to +1 if you'd like to see this feature).

Workarounds

To pause trigger checks for an entire connection:

You can use the PDT Maintenance Schedule to control when Looker sends trigger queries to that database.

It's a cron string, which means you can get a full pause by setting the date to something in the future. For example, if today is the 2nd and you want to pause all trigger checks you could set the cron task to 0 * 31 12 * for "every hour on the 31st of December".

To pause trigger checks for one PDT:

You can comment out sql_trigger_value or persist_for for a given PDT and push it to production to stop it from building.

To control PDT build order:

Janky workaround: you can write in dependencies like ${desired_PDT.SQL_TABLE_NAME} (explained here) to the SQL of derived tables to influence the order they are run in.

This content is subject to limited support.                

[shubhanshusoni-]

I believe we can also go through the admin tab queries setting to stop building a pdt manually!