Create snapshot tables in an external location

[stockx-dhruv]

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In the non-snapshot models we have a config parameter location_root that we can leverage to create external tables. Issue is when we pass the parameter in snapshots it doesn't work. DBT still creates the model in the schema location.

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[karasda]

We are on 1.10.14 and the location_root parameter for snapshot is working for us.
(We are defining it in a project.yml and not in the "config" part of models)

[TangoEnSkai]

Following up on @karasda's report that this works on 1.10.14 — the code path on main supports it.

Snapshots build their table through create_table_as (materializations/snapshot.sql), which resolves to databricks__create_table_as in relations/table/create.sql, and that emits location_clause(catalog_relation) alongside the other clauses. The catalog relation gets its location from parse_model.location_root(model), which reads location_root off any node's config — it is not model-specific — and joins it with the identifier path:

@property
def location(self) -> Optional[str]:
    if self.location_root and self.location_path:
        return posixpath.join(self.location_root, self.location_path)

Only the initial snapshot build goes through create_table_as; later runs merge into the existing table, so the location is set once at creation as expected.

One gap worth noting: there is no functional test pinning this. grep -rn "location_root" tests/functional/ only turns up incremental, seed, persist_docs, and python-model cases — nothing for snapshots — so the behavior is currently unprotected against regression even though it works.

Caveat: I verified the code path and clause construction, not an end-to-end run against a workspace with a real external location. If a maintainer can confirm, this looks closeable (optionally with a snapshot case added to the location_root coverage first).