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S3

Overview

The S3 source enables syncing of file-based tables with support for multiple files using glob-like pattern matching, and both Full Refresh and Incremental syncs, using the last_modified property of files to determine incremental batches. This connector does not support syncing unstructured data files such as raw text, audio, or videos. You can choose if this connector will read only the new/updated files, or all the matching files, every time a sync is run.

Connector allows using either Amazon S3 storage or 3rd party S3 compatible service like Wasabi or custom S3 services set up with minio, leofs, ceph etc.

Output Schema

At this time, this source produces only a single stream (table) for the target files.

By default, the schema will be automatically inferred from all the relevant files present when setting up the connection, however you can also specify a schema in the source settings to enforce desired columns and datatypes. Any additional columns found (on any sync) are packed into an extra mapping field called _ab_additional_properties. Any missing columns will be added and null-filled.

We'll be considering extending these behaviours in the future and welcome your feedback!

Note that you should provide the dataset which dictates how the table will be identified in the destination.

Data Types

Currently, complex types (array and object) are coerced to string, but we'll be looking to improve support for this in the future!

Features

Feature Supported?
Full Refresh Sync Yes
Incremental Sync Yes
Replicate Incremental Deletes No
Replicate Multiple Files (pattern matching) Yes
Replicate Multiple Streams (distinct tables) No
Namespaces No

File Compressions

Compression Supported?
Gzip Yes
Zip No
Bzip2 Yes
Lzma No
Xz No
Snappy No

Please let us know any specific compressions you'd like to see support for next!

File Formats

File Formats are mostly enabled (and further tested) thanks to other open-source libraries that we are using under the hood such as:

Format Supported?
CSV Yes
Parquet Yes
JSON No
HTML No
XML No
Excel No
Feather No
Pickle No

We're looking to enable these other formats very soon, so watch this space!

Getting started

Requirements

  • If syncing from a private bucket, the credentials you use for the connection must have have both read and list access on the S3 bucket. list is required to discover files based on the provided pattern(s).

Quickstart

  1. Create a new S3 source with a suitable name. Since each S3 source maps to just a single table, it may be worth including that in the name.
  2. Set dataset appropriately. This will be the name of the table in the destination.
  3. If your bucket contains only files containing data for this table, use ** as path_pattern. See the Path Patterns section for more specific pattern matching.
  4. Leave schema as {} to automatically infer it from the file(s). For details on providing a schema, see the User Schema section.
  5. Fill in the fields within the provider box appropriately. If your bucket is not public, add credentials with sufficient permissions under aws_access_key_id and aws_secret_access_key.
  6. Choose the format corresponding to the format of your files and fill in fields as required. If unsure about values, try out the defaults and come back if needed. Find details on these settings here.

Path Pattern

(tl;dr -> path pattern syntax using wcmatch.glob. GLOBSTAR and SPLIT flags are enabled.)

This connector can sync multiple files by using glob-style patterns, rather than requiring a specific path for every file. This enables:

  • Referencing many files with just one pattern, e.g. ** would indicate every file in the bucket.
  • Referencing future files that don't exist yet (and therefore don't have a specific path).

You must provide a path pattern. You can also provide many patterns split with | for more complex directory layouts.

Each path pattern is a reference from the root of the bucket, so don't include the bucket name in the pattern(s).

Some example patterns:

  • ** : match everything.
  • **/*.csv : match all files with specific extension.
  • myFolder/**/*.csv : match all csv files anywhere under myFolder.
  • */** : match everything at least one folder deep.
  • */*/*/** : match everything at least three folders deep.
  • **/file.*|**/file : match every file called "file" with any extension (or no extension).
  • x/*/y/* : match all files that sit in folder x -> any folder -> folder y.
  • **/prefix*.csv : match all csv files with specific prefix.
  • **/prefix*.parquet : match all parquet files with specific prefix.

Let's look at a specific example, matching the following bucket layout:

myBucket
    -> log_files
    -> some_table_files
        -> part1.csv
        -> part2.csv
    -> images
    -> more_table_files
        -> part3.csv
    -> extras
        -> misc
            -> another_part1.csv

We want to pick up part1.csv, part2.csv and part3.csv (excluding another_part1.csv for now). We could do this a few different ways:

  • We could pick up every csv file called "partX" with the single pattern **/part*.csv.
  • To be a bit more robust, we could use the dual pattern some_table_files/*.csv|more_table_files/*.csv to pick up relevant files only from those exact folders.
  • We could achieve the above in a single pattern by using the pattern *table_files/*.csv. This could however cause problems in the future if new unexpected folders started being created.
  • We can also recursively wildcard, so adding the pattern extras/**/*.csv would pick up any csv files nested in folders below "extras", such as "extras/misc/another_part1.csv".

As you can probably tell, there are many ways to achieve the same goal with path patterns. We recommend using a pattern that ensures clarity and is robust against future additions to the directory structure.

User Schema

Providing a schema allows for more control over the output of this stream. Without a provided schema, columns and datatypes will be inferred from each file and a superset schema created. This will probably be fine in most cases but there may be situations you want to enforce a schema instead, e.g.:

  • You only care about a specific known subset of the columns. The other columns would all still be included, but packed into the _ab_additional_properties map.
  • Your initial dataset is quite small (in terms of number of records), and you think the automatic type inference from this sample might not be representative of the data in the future.
  • You want to purposely define types for every column.
  • You know the names of columns that will be added to future data and want to include these in the core schema as columns rather than have them appear in the _ab_additional_properties map.

Or any other reason! The schema must be provided as valid JSON as a map of {"column": "datatype"} where each datatype is one of:

  • string
  • number
  • integer
  • object
  • array
  • boolean
  • null

For example:

  • {"id": "integer", "location": "string", "longitude": "number", "latitude": "number"}
  • {"username": "string", "friends": "array", "information": "object"}

S3 Provider Settings

  • bucket : name of the bucket your files are in

  • aws_access_key_id : one half of the required credentials for accessing a private bucket.

  • aws_secret_access_key : other half of the required credentials for accessing a private bucket.

  • path_prefix : an optional string that limits the files returned by AWS when listing files to only that those starting with this prefix. This is different to path_pattern as it gets pushed down to the API call made to S3 rather than filtered in Airbyte and it does not accept pattern-style symbols (like wildcards *). We recommend using this if your bucket has many folders and files that are unrelated to this stream and all the relevant files will always sit under this chosen prefix.

  • endpoint : optional parameter that allow using of non Amazon S3 compatible services. Leave it blank for using default Amazon serivce.

  • use_ssl : Allows using custom servers that configured to use plain http. Ignored in case of using Amazon service.

  • verify_ssl_cert : Skip ssl validity check in case of using custom servers with self signed certificates. Ignored in case of using Amazon service.

    File Format Settings

    The Reader in charge of loading the file format is currently based on PyArrow (Apache Arrow).

    Note that all files within one stream must adhere to the same read options for every provided format.

CSV

Since CSV files are effectively plain text, providing specific reader options is often required for correct parsing of the files. These settings are applied when a CSV is created or exported so please ensure that this process happens consistently over time.

  • delimiter : Even though CSV is an acronymn for Comma Separated Values, it is used more generally as a term for flat file data that may or may not be comma separated. The delimiter field lets you specify which character acts as the separator.

  • quote_char : In some cases, data values may contain instances of reserved characters (like a comma, if that's the delimiter). CSVs can allow this behaviour by wrapping a value in defined quote characters so that on read it can parse it correctly.

  • escape_char : An escape character can be used to prefix a reserved character and allow correct parsing.

  • encoding : Some data may use a different character set (typically when different alphabets are involved). See the list of allowable encodings here.

  • double_quote : Whether two quotes in a quoted CSV value denote a single quote in the data.

  • newlines_in_values : Sometimes referred to as multiline. In most cases, newline characters signal the end of a row in a CSV, however text data may contain newline characters within it. Setting this to True allows correct parsing in this case.

  • block_size : This is the number of bytes to process in memory at a time while reading files. The default value here is usually fine but if your table is particularly wide (lots of columns / data in fields is large) then raising this might solve failures on detecting schema. Since this defines how much data to read into memory, raising this too high could cause Out Of Memory issues so use with caution.

  • additional_reader_options : This allows for editing the less commonly required CSV ConvertOptions. The value must be a valid JSON string, e.g.:

    {"timestamp_parsers": ["%m/%d/%Y %H:%M", "%Y/%m/%d %H:%M"], "strings_can_be_null": true, "null_values": ["NA", "NULL"]}

  • advanced_options : This allows for editing the less commonly required CSV ReadOptions. The value must be a valid JSON string. One use case for this is when your CSV has no header, or you want to use custom column names, you can specify column_names using this option.

    {"column_names": ["column1", "column2", "column3"]}

Parquet

Apache Parquet file is a column-oriented data storage format of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. It provides efficient data compression and encoding schemes with enhanced performance to handle complex data in bulk. For now this solutiion are iterating through individual files at the abstract-level thus partitioned parquet datasets are unsupported. The following settings are available:

  • buffer_size : If positive, perform read buffering when deserializing individual column chunks. Otherwise IO calls are unbuffered.
  • columns : If not None, only these columns will be read from the file.
  • batch_size : Maximum number of records per batch. Batches may be smaller if there aren’t enough rows in the file.

You can find details on here.

Changelog

Version Date Pull Request Subject
0.1.10 2022-01-28 8252 Refactoring of files' metadata
0.1.9 2022-01-06 9163 Work-around for web-UI, backslash - t converts to tab for format.delimiter field.
0.1.7 2021-11-08 7499 Remove base-python dependencies
0.1.6 2021-10-15 6615 & 7058 Memory and performance optimisation. Advanced options for CSV parsing.
0.1.5 2021-09-24 6398 Support custom non Amazon S3 services
0.1.4 2021-08-13 5305 Support of Parquet format
0.1.3 2021-08-04 5197 Fixed bug where sync could hang indefinitely on schema inference
0.1.2 2021-08-02 5135 Fixed bug in spec so it displays in UI correctly
0.1.1 2021-07-30 4990 Fixed documentation url in source definition
0.1.0 2021-07-30 4990 Created S3 source connector