Plumbing

Magical DataOps insights from our Chief Data Plumber

NZ Scaleup AgileData achieves Google Cloud Ready – BigQuery Designation

AgileData has achieved Google Cloud Ready – BigQuery designation, streamlining data management for customers and partners. This certification confirms the integration’s functionality and reliability, reducing complexity through a low-code interface. By leveraging Google Cloud’s infrastructure and BigQuery, AgileData empowers business leaders to rapidly gain insights and make informed decisions efficiently.

The challenge of parsing files from the wild

In this instalment of the AgileData DataOps series, we’re exploring how we handle the challenges of parsing files from the wild. To ensure clean and well-structured data, each file goes through several checks and processes, similar to a water treatment plant. These steps include checking for previously seen files, looking for matching schema files, queuing the file, and parsing it. If a file fails to load, we have procedures in place to retry loading or notify errors for later resolution. This rigorous data processing ensures smooth and efficient data flow.

Magical plumbing for effective change dates
Magical plumbing for effective change dates

We discuss how to handle change data in a hands-off filedrop process. We use the ingestion timestamp as a simple proxy for the effective date of each record, allowing us to version each day’s data. For files with multiple change records, we scan all columns to identify and rank potential effective date columns. We then pass this information to an automated rule, ensuring it gets applied as we load the data. This process enables us to efficiently handle change data, track data flow, and manage multiple changes in an automated way.

ELT without persisted watermarks ? not a problem
ELT without persisted watermarks ? not a problem

We no longer need to manually track the state of a table, when it was created, when it was updated, which data pipeline last touched it …. all these data points are available by doing a simple call to the logging and bigquery api. Under the covers the google cloud platform is already tracking everything we need … every insert, update, delete, create, load, drop, alter is being captured

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