I am using ADF to keep an Azure SQL DB in sync with an on-prem DB. The on-prem DB is read only and the direction is one-way, from the Azure SQL DB to the on-prem DB.
My source table in the Azure SQL Cloud DB is quite large (10's of millions of rows) so I have the pipeline set to use an UPSERT (merge, trying to create a differential merge). I am using a filter on the Source table and the and the Filter Query has a WHERE condition that looks like this:
[HistoryDate] >= '#{formatDateTime(pipeline().parameters.windowStart, 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm' )}'
AND [HistoryDate] < '#{formatDateTime(pipeline().parameters.windowEnd, 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm' )}'
The HistoryDate column is auto-maintained in the source table with a getUTCDate() type approach. New records will always get a higher value and be included in the WHERE condition.
This works well, but here is my question: I am testing on my local machine before deploying to the client. When I am not working, my laptop hibernates and the pipeline rightfully fails because my local SQL Instance is "offline" during that run. When I move this to production this should not be an issue (computer hibernating), but what happens if the clients connection is temporarily lost (i.e, the client loses internet for a time)? Because my pipeline has a WHERE condition on the source to reduce the table size upsert to a practical number, any failure would result in a loss of any data created during that 5 minute window.
A failed pipeline can be rerun, but the run time would be different at that moment in time and I would effectively miss the block of records that would have been picked up if the pipeline had been run on time. pipeline().parameters.windowStart and pipeline().parameters.windowEnd will now be different.
As an FYI, I have this running every 5 minutes to keep the local copy in sync as close to real-time as possible.
Am I approaching this correctly? I'm sure others have this scenario and it's likely I am missing something obvious. :-)
Thanks...
Sorry to answer my own question, but to potentially help others in the future, it seems there was a better way to deal with this.
ADF offers a "Metadata-driven Copy Task" utility/wizard on the home screen that creates a pipeline. When I used it, it offers a "Delta Load" option for tables which takes a "Watermark". The watermark is a column for an incrementing IDENTITY column, increasing date or timestamp, etc. At the end of the wizard, it allows you to download a script that builds a table and corresponding stored procedure that maintains the values of each parameters after each run. For example, if I wanted my delta load to be based on an IDENTITY column, it stores the value of the max value of a particular pipeline run. The next time a run happens (trigger), it uses this as the MIN value (minus 1) and the current MAX value of the IDENTITY column to get the added records since the last run.
I was going to approach things this way, but it seems like ADF already does this heavy lifting for us. :-)
Related
We are working building a new data pipeline for our project and we have to move incremental updates that happen throughout the day on our SQL servers into Azure synapse for some number crunching.
We have to get updates which occur across 60+ tables ( 1-2 million updates a day ) into synapse to crunch some aggregates and statistics as they happen throughout the day.
One of the requirements is being near real time and doing a bulk import into synapse is not ideal because it takes more than 10 mins to do full compute on all data.
I have been reading about CDC feed into synapse https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/tutorial-incremental-copy-change-data-capture-feature-portal and it is one possible solution.
Wondering if there are other alternatives to this or suggestions for achieving the end goal of data crunching near real time for DB updates.
Change Data Capture (CDC) is the suited way to capture the changes and add to the destination location (storage/database).
Apart from that, you can also use watermark column to capture the changes in multiple tables in SQL Server.
Select one column for each table in the source data store, which you
can identify the new or updated records for every run. Normally, the
data in this selected column (for example, last_modify_time or ID)
keeps increasing when rows are created or updated. The maximum value
in this column is used as a watermark.
Here is the high-level solution diagram for this approach:
Step-by-Step approach is given in this official document Incrementally load data from multiple tables in SQL Server to Azure SQL Database using PowerShell.
I have 2 tables. The source table being from a linked server and destination table being from the other server.
I want my data load to happen in the following manner:
Everyday at night I have scheduled a job to do a full dump i.e. truncate the table and load all the data from the source to the destination.
Every 15 minutes to do incremental load as data gets ingested into the source on second basis. I need to replicate the same on the destination too.
For incremental load as of now I have created scripts which are stored in a stored procedure but for future purposes we would like to implement SSIS for this case.
The scripts run in the below manner:
I have an Inserted_Date column, on the basis of this column I take the max of that column and delete all the rows that are greater than or equal to the Max(Inserted_Date) and insert all the similar values from the source to the destination. This job runs evert 15 minutes.
How to implement similar scenario in SSIS?
I have worked on SSIS using the lookup and conditional split using ID columns, but these tables I am working with have a lot of rows so lookup takes up a lot of the time and this is not the right solution to be implemented for my scenario.
Is there any way I can get Max(Inserted_Date) logic into SSIS solution too. My end goal is to remove the approach using scripts and replicate the same approach using SSIS.
Here is the general Control Flow:
There's plenty to go on here, but you may need to learn how to set variables from an Execute SQL and so on.
I'm trying to sync a local flock of data to an azure database, however as I have a lot of data it's taking a long time to sync first. I have already put the data in my azure database through the migration program. Even so, when I do the first synchronization it takes all the data. How to make it sync only the changes.
scenario:
local database
azure database (copy of local bank 1)
azure do not synchronize all data on first synchronization
Azure Data Sync currently does not support this scenario. When two databases are put in the sync group, they will be synchronized until each row has been resolved.
Data Sync won't know the two databases are identical until it compares the data row by row. It is a very costly process and may take a long time if you have large databases/tables. Our recommendation is to have data only on one side and keep the same table empty in the other databases. In this case, data sync will use bulk load during initialization and it is much faster than row by row comparison.
Hope this helps.
I found a kludge way to skip the initial sync.
First setup and start the sync one time and wait for the provisioning to complete. Then stop the sync.
Then execute
update [YOURDB].[DataSync].[provision_marker_dss]
set [state] = 0
where object_id = object_id('YourSyncTable')
Then start the sync again. It will complete almost instantly.
Then execute
update [YOURDB].[DataSync].[provision_marker_dss]
set [state] = 1
where object_id = object_id('YourSyncTable')
And then you should be good to go.
I am migrating data from an Oracle database to a SQL server 2008 r2 database using SSIS. My problem is that at a certain point the package fails, say some 40,000 rows out of 100,000 rows. What can I do so that the next time when I run the package after correcting the errors or something, I want it to be restarted from the 40,001st row, i.e, the row where the error had occured.
I have tried using checkpoint in SSIS, but the problem is that they work only between different control flow tasks. I want something that can work on the rows that are being transferred.
There's no native magic I'm aware of that is going to "know" that it failed on row 40,000 and when it restarts, it should start streaming row 40,001. You are correct that checkpoints are not the answer and have plenty of their own issues (can't serialize Object types, loops restart, etc).
How you can address the issue is through good design. If your package is created with the expectation that it's going to fail, then you should be able to handle these scenarios.
There are two approaches I'm familiar with. The first approach is to add a Lookup Transformation in the Data Flow between your source and your destination. The goal of this is to identify what records exist in the target system. If no match is found, then only those rows will be sent on to destination. This is a very common pattern and will allow you to also detect changes between source and destination (if that is a need). The downside is that you will always be transferring the full data set out of the source system and then filtering rows in the data flow. If it failed on row 99,999 out of 1,000,000 you will still need to stream all 1,000,000 rows back to SSIS for it to find the 1 that hasn't been sent.
The other approach is to use a dynamic filter in your WHERE clause of your source. If you can make assumptions like the rows are inserted in order, then you can structure your SSIS package to look like Execute SQL Task where you run a query like SELECT COALESCE(MAX(SomeId), 0) +1 AS startingPoint FROM dbo.MyTable against the Destination database and then assign that to an SSIS variable (#[User::StartingId]). You then use an expression on your select statement from the Source to be something like "SELECT * FROM dbo.MyTable T WHERE T.SomeId > " + (DT_WSTR, 10) #[User::StartingId] Now when the data flow begins, it will start where it last loaded data. The challenge on this approach is finding those scenarios where you know data hasn't been inserted out of order.
Let me know if you have questions, need things better explained, pictures, etc. Also, above code is freehanded so there could be syntax errors but the logic should be correct.
I need to push a large SQL table from my local instance to SQL Azure. The transfer is a simple, 'clean' upload - simply push the data into a new, empty table.
The table is extremely large (~100 million rows) and consist only of GUIDs and other simple types (no timestamp or anything).
I create an SSIS package using the Data Import / Export Wizard in SSMS. The package works great.
The problem is when the package is run over a slow or intermittent connection. If the internet connection goes down halfway through, then there is no way to 'resume' the transfer.
What is the best approach to engineering an SSIS package to upload this data, in a resumable fashion? i.e. in case of connection failure, or to allow the job to be run only between specific time windows.
Normally, in a situation like that, I'd design the package to enumerate through batches of size N (1k row, 10M rows, whatever) and log to a processing table what the last successful batch transmitted would be. However, with GUIDs you can't quite partition them out into buckets.
In this particular case, I would modify your data flow to look like Source -> Lookup -> Destination. In your lookup transformation, query the Azure side and only retrieve the keys (SELECT myGuid FROM myTable). Here, we're only going to be interested in rows that don't have a match in the lookup recordset as those are the ones pending transmission.
A full cache is going to cost about 1.5GB (100M * 16bytes) of memory assuming the Azure side was fully populated plus the associated data transfer costs. That cost will be less than truncating and re-transferring all the data but just want to make sure I called it out.
Just order by your GUID when uploading. And make sure you use the max(guid) from Azure as your starting point when recovering from a failure or restart.