Remove usage of no_gaps

Author: erindru

sqlmesh/core/context.py

@@ -1518,8 +1518,11 @@ def plan_builder(
             include_unmodified = self.config.plan.include_unmodified
 
         if skip_backfill and not no_gaps and not is_dev:
-            raise ConfigError(
-                "When targeting the production environment either the backfill should not be skipped or the lack of data gaps should be enforced (--no-gaps flag)."
+            # note: we deliberately don't mention the --no-gaps flag in case the plan came from the sqlmesh_dbt command
+            # todo: perhaps we could have better error messages if we check sys.argv[0] for which cli is running?
+            self.console.log_warning(
+                "Skipping the backfill stage for production can lead to unexpected results, such as tables being empty or incremental data with non-contiguous time ranges being made available.\n"
+                "If you are doing this deliberately to create an empty version of a table to test a change, please consider using Virtual Data Environments instead."
             )
 
         if not skip_linter:

sqlmesh_dbt/operations.py

@@ -127,15 +127,12 @@ def _plan_options(
             )
 
         if empty:
-            # dbt --empty adds LIMIT 0 to the queries, resulting in empty tables
-            # this lines up with --skip-backfill in SQLMesh
+            # `dbt --empty` adds LIMIT 0 to the queries, resulting in empty tables. In addition, it happily clobbers existing tables regardless of if they are populated.
+            # This *partially* lines up with --skip-backfill in SQLMesh, which indicates to not populate tables if they happened to be created/updated as part of this plan.
+            # However, if a table already exists and has data in it, there is no change so SQLMesh will not recreate the table and thus it will not be cleared.
+            # So in order to fully replicate dbt's --empty, we also need --full-refresh semantics in order to replace existing tables
             options["skip_backfill"] = True
-
-            if is_prod:
-                # to prevent the following error:
-                # > ConfigError: When targeting the production environment either the backfill should not be skipped or
-                # > the lack of data gaps should be enforced (--no-gaps flag).
-                options["no_gaps"] = True
+            full_refresh = True
 
         if full_refresh:
             # TODO: handling this requires some updates in the engine to enable restatements+changes in the same plan without affecting prod
@@ -186,6 +183,12 @@ def create(
         from sqlmesh_dbt.console import DbtCliConsole
         from sqlmesh.utils.errors import SQLMeshError
 
+        # clear any existing handlers set up by click/rich as defaults so that once SQLMesh logging config is applied,
+        # we dont get duplicate messages logged from things like console.log_warning()
+        root_logger = logging.getLogger()
+        while root_logger.hasHandlers():
+            root_logger.removeHandler(root_logger.handlers[0])
+
         configure_logging(force_debug=debug)
         set_console(DbtCliConsole())
 

tests/cli/test_cli.py

@@ -261,8 +261,7 @@ def test_plan_skip_backfill(runner, tmp_path, flag):
     result = runner.invoke(cli, ["--log-file-dir", tmp_path, "--paths", tmp_path, "plan", flag])
     assert result.exit_code == 1
     assert (
-        "Error: When targeting the production environment either the backfill should not be skipped or the lack of data gaps should be enforced (--no-gaps flag)."
-        in result.output
+        "Skipping the backfill stage for production can lead to unexpected results" in result.output
     )
 
     # plan executes virtual update without executing model batches