Dependent upstream assets doesn't always require materialization

[championmeatball]

Hi All,

Hopefully this is the right place to ask this question. I have defined several assets that exist as components of my pipeline. There are some cases where I want to materialize all the assets in the pipeline and other cases where I may only want to update one of the assets in the pipeline. It's not quite clear to me if or how I should setup my asset job to handle this? I see that I can define dependencies between assets such a downstream asset is materialized only after it's upstream asset is materialized first, but I may not always want to do that.

As an example, let's say I have an asset this is responsible for clearing a table in my DB and populating it with some source data and another asset is responsible for taking that source data and transforming it to insert into a new table. If I am running the full pipeline, I do want to make sure the source data is cleared and updated before running the transform, but in other cases I may change the logic of just the transform step and only want to update transform table without clearing and repopulating the source data. So the downstream asset is dependent on the upstream asset, but that upstream asset doesn't always require materialization.

Does anyone have a recommendation or example for how to set this up?

Thanks!