# dbt Core v1.6.0 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** dbt Core (https://www.getdbt.com)
- **Version:** v1.6.0
- **Released:** Jul 31, 2023
- **Impact Score:** 7/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Source flagged
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/dbt-core/updates/v1.6.0/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
dbt Core v1.6.0. Source highlight: dbt-core 1.6.0 - Quiara Alegría Hudes (July 31, 2023)

## Breaking Changes & Deprecations
- Breaking Changes - Dropped support for Python 3.7 ([#7082](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/7082))
- - Detect breaking changes to enforced constraints ([#7065](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/7065))
- - Detect breaking contract changes to versioned models ([#8030](https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-core/issues/8030))

## New Features
- Add merge as valid incremental strategy for postgres (#1880)
- Skip catalog generation (#6980)
- Add support for materialized views (#6911)
- Publication artifacts and cross-project ref (#7227)
- Optimize template rendering for common parse scenarios (#7449)
- Add graph structure summaries to target path output (#7357)

## Improvements
- Small UX improvements to model versions: Support defining latest_version in unsuffixed file by default. Notify on unpinned ref when a prerelease version is available.  (#7443)

## Bug Fixes
- Revamp debug, add --connection flag. Prepare for future refactors/interface changes. (#7104)
- Raise better error message when dispatching a package that is not installed (#5801)
- add negative part_number arg for split part macro (#7915)
- Persist timing info in run results for failed nodes (#5476)
- fix typo in unpacking statically parsed ref (#7364)
- safe version attribute access in _check_resource_uniqueness (#7375)