Yanan Cai shows a GUI for creating U-SQL EXTRACT scripts via Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio:
One of U-SQL’s core capabilities is to be able to schematize unstructured data on the fly without having to create a metadata object for it. This capability is provided by the EXTRACT expression that will invoke either a user-defined extractor or built-in extractor to process the input file or set of files specified in the FROM clause and produces a rowset whose schema is specified in the EXTRACT clause.
While using the build-in extractor to schema semi-structured data, like data in .csv file, the schema definition in U-SQL is slow and error prone, especially for the .csv file contains hundreds of columns.
Recently, we released a new feature in the latest version of Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio to help you generate this U-SQL EXTRACT statement automatically.
Click through for an example as well as a video showing the process.