Is Meltano designed to execute dbt jobs, irrespective of a tap/target? i.e. can I just schedule a dbt project to run on a schedule?

Yes, you can absolutely do so - you might need to override one of the environment variables, since by default I think Meltano will default to a specific target model. I think we have a doc on this but it's end of day here and I'm not able to find it. Will try to report back when I have that link, but wanted to say in the meanwhile that, yes this is supported. 👍

@brett It’s possible with a few tricks: you can use “meltano schedule” with “--transform=only”, but you’ll still need to provide a rap and target name since those determine the model to run and warehouse configuration to use. But you can override the model using the “DBT_MODELS” environment variable, which you can manually add to the schedule definition in meltano.yml under an “env” key. That part is definitely documented :) It’d look like:

schedules:
- name: dbt-job
  extractor: tap-dummy
  loader: target-snowflake
  transform: only
  env:
    DBT_MODELS: my-model