[CT-65] [Bug] Metrics' names shouldn’t be allowed to contain spaces

[joellabes]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Current Behavior

I'm working on macros to generate SQL to calculate metrics, and want to be able to use metric.name as the column alias. I just discovered that they're allowed to contain spaces - I don't know if this was intentional or not considered, but I think it's bad when there's a human-readable label available as well.

Expected Behavior

slack users to be rejected because it's not [_A-Za-z] (or maybe even just [_a-z]?)

Steps To Reproduce

metrics:
    - name: slack joiners
      label: Members of Community Slack
      model: dim_slack_users_2

Relevant log output

No response

Environment

- dbt: 1.0.0

What database are you using dbt with?

snowflake

Additional Context

No response

[gshank]

I think that this was an oversight. We'll discuss what we'd like to accept for the metrics name and fix this.

[leahwicz]

@jtcohen6 is the exit criteria here just to prohibit spaces in metric names?

[joellabes]

My preference would be to constrain it pretty severely - right now I'm passing the metric name directly in as a column alias. For example, even the metrics that our internal data team has made will be problematic, cos they're using periods:

  - name: okr_1.2.0__new_verified_accounts_activated
    label: New Verified Accounts Activated
    model: ref('fct_cloud_accounts')
    description: '{{ doc("okr_new_verified_accounts_activated") }}'
...

Ideally it should be just stuff that's legal in a column name (which also has implications around whether a metric's name can start with a digit).

Alternatively, I can tidy up the column alias myself, but that could cause conflicts with any low-code tools built on top of the metrics package that will need to know how to find the resulting column.