Pipes¶

A pipe defines the flow of data from a source to a sink on some schedule as defined by the pump settings. Optionally, a pipe may define an ordered list of transforms that are applied to entities as they flow from the source to the sink. As the name implies, a pump “pumps” data in the form of entities from the source to the sink at regular or scheduled intervals. A chain of transforms can be placed in between the source and the sink, so that entities are transformed on their way to the sink.

The pipe configuration consists of a source, transform, sink and a pump.

Note that the forward slash character (“/”) is not allowed in the pipe _id property.

Prototype¶

The following JSON snippet shows the general form of a pipe definition.

{
  "_id": "pipe-id",
  "name": "Name of pipe",
  "description": "This is a description of the pipe",
  "comment": "This is a comment",
  "type": "pipe",
  "source": {
  },
  "transform": {
  },
  "sink": {
  },
  "pump": {
  },
  "metadata": {
  }
}

Note that if no name property is explicitly set for the source, sink or pump configurations one will be generated based on the name of the pipe (i.e. the contents of this property postfixed with “source”, “sink” or “pump” respectively).

Batching¶

Pipes support batching if the sink supports batching. It does this by accumulating source entities in a buffer before writing the batch to transforms and the sink. The size of each batch can be specified using the batch_size property on the pipe. The default batch size is usually 100, but this may vary depending on the source- and sink-type used in the pipe. The REST sink will for instance make the default batch_size 1.

Note that the sink may have its own batch_size property. This is useful if the pipe has transforms that produce more entities than the number of entities taken as input.

Properties¶

Property	Type	Description	Default	Req
`_id`	String	The id of the pipe, this should be unique within a Sesam service instance. Note that you cannot use the `/` character in the id property.		Yes
`type`	String	The type of the component, for pipes the only allowed value is “pipe”		Yes
`name`	String	A human readable name of the component.
`description`	String or list of strings	A human readable description of the component.
`comment`	String or list of strings	A human readable comment on the component.
`batch_size`	Integer(>=1)	The number of source entities to consume before writing to the sink. The batch size can be used to buffer up entities so that they can be written together to the sink in one go. The sink must support batch for the bulking to happen. This may increase the throughput of the pipe, at the cost of extra memory usage. If the batch fails, then entities will be retried individually.	usually 100, but varies with other pipe settings.
`checkpoint_interval`	Integer(>=1)	Specifies how often the pipe offset is saved. It says how many batches must be processed before the pipe offset is saved the next time. Note that the pipe offset is always saved at the end of the sync if it changed. The default value is 10000/`batch_size` = 100, i.e. the checkpoint happens every 100 batches. The exception is if `batch_size` is 1, in which case the default value of `checkpoint_interval` is also set to 1.	100 (1 if batch_size=1)
`disable_set_last_seen`	Boolean	If this flag is set to `true`, it will no longer be possible to reset or set the ‘last seen’ parameter for this pipe. The primary use case for this property is when you need to protect the pipe from accidental resets.	`false`
`enable_background_rescan`	Boolean	When set to true, enables running pipe rescans in the background for this pipe.	`false`
`source`	Object	A configuration object for the source component of the pipe.		Yes
`transform`	Object/List	Zero or more configuration objects for the transform components of the pipe. The default is to do no transformation of the entities. If a list of more than one transform components is given, then they are chained together in the order given. This means that the output of the first transform is passed as the input of the second, and so on. The output of the last transform is then passed to the sink. The first transform gets its input from the source.
`sink`	Object	A configuration object for the sink component of the pipe. If omitted, it defaults to a dataset sink with its `dataset` property set to same as the pipe’s `_id` property.
`pump`	Object	A configuration object for the pump component of the pipe.
`infer_pipe_entity_types`	Boolean	Schema inferencing is enabled for all pipes by default. Setting this property to false will disable schema inferencing for this pipe.	`true`
`dependency_tracking.dependency_warning_threshold`	Integer	The number of entities that dependency tracking can keep in memory at a given time. If this number is exceeded then a warning message is written to the log. The default value is inherited from the service metadata.	`10000`
`dependency_tracking.dependency_error_threshold`	Integer	The number of entities that dependency tracking can keep in memory at a given time. If this number is exceeded then the pump will fail. The default value is inherited from the service metadata. Do not set this value too high as it may cause excessive memory usage.	`50000`
`dependency_tracking.dependency_warning_threshold_total_bytes`	Integer	The number of bytes that dependency tracking can keep in memory at a given time. If this number is exceeded then a warning message is written to the log. The default value is inherited from the service metadata.	`33554432` (32MB)
`dependency_tracking.dependency_error_threshold_total_bytes`	Integer	The number of bytes that dependency tracking can keep in memory at a given time. If this number is exceeded then the pump will fail. The default value is inherited from the service metadata. Do not set this value too high as it may cause excessive memory usage.	`134217728` (128MB)
`dependency_tracking.enable_hops_thresholds`	Boolean	If `true`, then warning and error thresholds that apply for dependency tracking also apply for regular `"hops"` expressions. The default value is inherited from the service metadata. It is recommended that you set this property to `true` in development environments.	`false`

Example configuration¶

The following example shows a pipe definition that exposes data from HubSpot’s REST API through the endpoint companies, and feeds it into a sink that writes the data into a dataset with the same _id as the pipe.

{
  "_id": "hubspot-company-collect",
  "type": "pipe",
  "source": {
    "type": "rest",
    "system": "hubspot",
    "id_expression": "{{ id }}",
    "operation": "get",
    "payload_property": "results",
    "properties": {
      "url": "companies"
    }
  },
  "add_namespaces": false,
  "namespaced_identifiers": false
}

Pipe Features¶

The following are available features that can be activate and/or changed on any pipe in Sesam.

Feature	Description
`Compaction`	Compaction decides how and when old entities should re removed from datasets.
`Circuit breakers`	Circuit breakers prevent pipes from running if the number of changed entities is too large.
`Automatic reprocessing`	Automatic reprocessing automatically resets a pipe when it is out of sync with its input data.
`Completeness`	Completeness lets pipes hold of processing of data until upstream dependencies are processed.
`Namespaces`	Namespaces allows tracking of property origins in Sesam.
`Durable data`	Durable data allows additional data storage to minimize likelihood of dataloss.

Service metadata

Sources