Model Data in MotherDuck

Use this skill when creating data models, tables, designing schemas, choosing data types, defining relationships between tables, or restructuring data for analytical workloads.

Core Behavior

When a user asks questions like "build a data model", "model my data", or "create a transformation layer", the default output is a file-based project scaffold — not just SQL executed directly in the warehouse.

The project scaffold includes:

• SQL files organized by lifecycle stage (raw/, staging/, analytics/)
• A manifest (model_manifest.yml) defining the DAG: model names, dependencies, materialization strategy, and target database

This is a lightweight framework-agnostic convention for organizing SQL transformations that can be reviewed, versioned, and rerun.

Prerequisites