Category: ETL / ELT

Eitan Blumin builds an app:

The general idea is this:

The app executes a Cosmos DB query and collects a number of records into its “buffer”.

Once that “buffer” reaches a certain number of records (configurable), it’s time to “flush” it into the SQL Server. That could be either a database table receiving a Bulk Copy stream, or a stored procedure receiving a table valued parameter (again, configurable).

After the buffer is flushed, we have the option to execute a “merge” procedure. This is a stored procedure that would implement an “upsert” logic from the “staging” table and into the actual destination table.

Read on for more explanation and check out Eitan’s GitHub repo.

Paul Andrew has been busy:

Following more great feedback from the Data Platform community the primary goal of this release was to further improve the resilience of the framework processing. These improvements included its restart clean up capabilities and introducing better dependency chain handling between Worker pipelines when failures occur. The latter builds on the existing restart functionality first introduced in release v1.2 and supplements the logic using a new set of pipeline dependency metadata. I’ve created the below visual to conceptually show the new dependency chain behaviour, should you wish to populate and make use of the new metadata handling.

Read on for the full changelog.

Rayis Imayev shows us how to use customer parameters in ARM templates when deploying Azure Data Factory pipelines:

If I needed to visually explain how this custom parameterization works for Azure Data Factory resource, I would picture it this way. Before you solely relied on publishing your ADF code from your collaboration Git branch to the adf_publish branch where ARMTemplateForFactory.jsonand ARMTemplateParametersForFactory.json files live and get further deployed to other environments. You had some flexibility to parameterize your deployment or run some custom code to update ARM templates before they get deployed.

With the introduction of the ADF custom parameterization, you have an additional JSON file arm-template-parameters-definition.json that you can use to define rules to add supplementary parameters to the main ARMTemplateParametersForFactory.json file. There is a very important statement on Microsoft documentation site that explains how this new file operates, “A definition can’t be specific to a resource instance. Any definition applies to all resources of that type”. It’s like a garden rake that will collect all the leaves or none, i.e. if your rule defines a JSON property, let’s say “timeout” of your ForEach loop container, then all timeouts will be scooped into ARM template parameter file.

Read on for the full explanation as well as an example.