Jobs in dbt Cloud

In dbt Cloud, there are two types of jobs:

• Deploy jobs — To create and set up triggers for building production data assets
• Continuous integration (CI) jobs — To create and set up triggers for checking code changes

Below is a comparison table that describes how deploy jobs and CI jobs behave:

	Deploy Jobs	CI Jobs
Purpose	Builds production data assets.	Builds and tests new code before merging changes into production.
Trigger types	Triggered by a schedule or by API.	Triggered by a commit to a PR or by API.
Destination	Builds into a production database and schema.	Builds into a staging database and ephemeral schema, lived for the lifetime of the PR.
Execution mode	Runs execute sequentially, so as to not have collisions on the underlying DAG.	Runs execute in parallel to promote team velocity.
Efficiency run savings	Detects over-scheduled jobs and cancels unnecessary runs to avoid queue clog.	Cancels existing runs when a newer commit is pushed to avoid redundant work.
State comparison	Only sometimes needs to detect state.	Almost always needs to compare state against the production environment to build on modified code and its dependents.
Job run duration	Limit is 24 hours.	Limit is 24 hours.