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Airflow Data Image Project GitLab Data Utils Project Python Guide

System Diagram

system_diagram

Editing the System Diagram

To edit the system diagram, go to the Lucidchart document and make the desired changes. If the changes are contained in the red box, the changes should be automatically reflected in GitLab. If the viewing area needs to be changed, then a new link will need to be generated using the Lucidchart documentation to publish, and an MR made to update the link used above to pull in the image.

Airflow

We use Airflow for all Orchestration.

Naming Conventions

Both DAG and task naming should be as descriptive as possible so that engineers and other users can understand what a DAG does both within and without the context of the airflow UI. Names should include information about what and how a DAG or task is doing.

As an example consider the DAG and task naming for the gitlab_com_db_extract DAG, which has tasks with names like gitlab-com-packages-package-files-db-incremental-pgp-extract. It is tempting to avoid the redundancy between the task and DAG naming, but since we sometimes only see the task name (like in Slack or Prometheus errors, or when using 'Browse' in airflow) it ends up being helpful.

Starting with Summer of 2021 we've introducted a more abbreviated, but hopefully equally descriptive way of describing some of the most common DAGs we create and this convention should be used in all DAG created since. Please use a prefix to indicate whats performed by that DAG. For example, if we had created the gitlab extract DAG after this convention it should be named el_gitlab_com_db_extract since it performs both extraction and loading phases, whereas greenhouse_extract would be l_greenhouse as it only loads extracted data from S3 into Snowflake.

List of prefix indicators | Prefix | Indicator | | —— | ——— | | e | Extract | | l | Load | | t | Transform | | p | Pump | | m | Metadata |

In Production

All DAGs are created using the KubernetesPodOperator, so the airflow pod itself has minimal dependencies and doesn't need to be restarted unless a major infrastructure change takes place.

There are 4 containers running in the current Airflow deployment as defined in the deployment.yml:

  1. A sidecar container checks the repo activity feed for any merges to master. If there was one, the sidecar will reclone the repo so that Airflow runs the freshest DAGs.
  2. The Airflow scheduler
  3. The Airflow webserver
  4. A cloudsql proxy that allows Airflow to connect to our cloudsql instance

Kubernetes Setup

We run in the gitlab-analysis project in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Airflow runs in the data-ops cluster.

Nodepools

Within this cluster there are 4 nodepools: highmem-pool, production-task-pool, testing-pool, and sdc-1. Each nodepool has a dedicated use for ease of monitoring and resource management.

1) highmem-pool - used to run the Airflow server, scheduler, and network components. Autoscales from 1-2 nodes. 2) production-task-pool - used to run most production Airflow tasks except SCD tasks. Autoscales from 1-5 nodes. 3) sdc-1 - used to run production SCD extractions. Autoscales from 1-3 nodes. 4) testing-pool - a pool that does not usually have a running node, but is used to run engineer's locally-launced Airflow tasks. Autoscales from 0-1 nodes.

All nodepools except the highmem-pool have labels and taints to manage which nodepool launches which Airflow task. For a task to be scheduled in a nodepool, a task must have nodeAffinity for the pool and it must have a toleration that matches the taint. See this MR where we added the affinity and toleration for the Slowly-Changing Dimensions task for our postgres pipeline jobs.

DNS

To enable the URL airflow.gitlabdata.com to point to our cluster, a static IP was provisioned in the us-west1 region using the command gcloud compute addresses create airflow-west --region=us-west1. The IP generated was 35.233.169.210. This is available by running gcloud compute addresses list. Note that the static IP must be a regional and not global IP for the TLS steps to work.

This was mapped to the domain in Route 53 by the infrastructure team, documented in this issue.

TLS

A certificate was generated for the airflow.gitlabdata.com domain via this infrastructure issue. This certificate was saved to a kubernetes secret by running the command kubectl create secret tls airflow-tls --cert=airflow.gitlabdata.com.chained.crt --key=airflow.gitlabdata.com.key - these are the actual filenames for the chained certificate and key. This created the secret airflow-tls. The certificate files (site, chain, chained (site+chain), and key) are also stored in the Data Team Secure vault in 1password.

We decided to use the NGINX Ingress Controller since it has excellent built-ins for redirecting and enforcing TLS. NGINX was installed into the cluster with this command helm install airflownginx stable/nginx-ingress --values nginx_values.yaml. The NGINX value file defines what the load balancer IP address is. The load balancer IP is set to the address generated in the previous section. The values passed into the install command are expanded in the controller-deployment.yaml file.

If NGINX needs to be deleted and reinstalled that can be done via helm delete airflownginx.

The ingress definition was also updated with these settings:

Although not strictly necessary, it is cleaner to delete the ingress when applying changes. This can be done via the UI in GCP or via the command kubectl delete ingress airflow-ingress. Applying the new configuration is done via the command kubectl apply -f ingress.yaml

Viewing Airflow Logs in GCP

Airflow logs of all kinds can be found in the Logs Explorer of Google Cloud. This application can be a little bit overwhelming with all of the different logs it collects, so here are some tips:

GCP IAM

It is recommended for Engineers to have the following permissions for GCP:

For developing with Airflow locally, Engineers will also need a service account. These credentials should point to a service account provisioned by your manager. The account should follow the same pattern as your email i.e. tmurphy@gitlab-analysis.iam.gserviceaccount.com. Recommended permissions are:

* Cloud SQL Client
* Kubernetes Engine Developer
* Storage Object Creator
* Storage Object Viewer

The service account key should be downloaded as JSON and sent to the user for secure storage on their computer.

Provisioning a Service Account

Handling Failed Jobs

There should never be more than one failed DAG run visible for any DAG at one time. For incremental jobs that rely on the execution_date, such as the extract from the gitlab.com database, any failed DAGs need to have their task instances cleared so that they can be rerun once the fix has been applied.

For jobs that are not dependent on execution_date the job should be rerun manually when the fix is applied and the failed DAGrun(s) should be deleted. If there is a failed DAGrun for a DAG it should mean that the current state of that DAG is broken and needs to be fixed.

This will make it easier to glance at the list of DAGs in Airflow and immediately know what needs attention and what doesn't.

Backfills

If incremental runs are missed for a given DAG or there is missing data in a table, there are two ways to do a backfill. If the table is small and a backfill would be relatively quick then dropping the table and doing a full sync is an option. However, for times when a DAG is stopped due to upstream errors, this may not be possible when there are a large number of tables.

In the latter case, it is better to run the backfill command in the airflow scheduler pod container. The command is:

airflow backfill gitlab_com_db_extract -s 2019-10-30T00:00:00 -e 2019-11-04T12:00:00 --delay_on_limit 30 --reset_dagruns

This will clear any DAGruns and task instances that already exist for the given time frame while also generating any new DAGruns that don't exist for the time frame. The Airflow documentation for the CLI details what the flags are.

Consider using the --task_regex flag to filter the tasks triggered. This is useful in the case of gitlab.com incremental loads where "pgp-extract" can be used to skip the downstream dbt tasks.

If DAG runs already exist for the timeframe that is being backfilled, the tasks may run concurrently when running the command above. If the DAGs need to run serially:

In Merge Requests

To facilitate the easier use of Airflow locally while still testing properly running our DAGs in Kubernetes, we use docker-compose to spin up local Airflow instances that then have the ability to run their DAG in Kubernetes using the KubernetesPodOperator. See the Docker section to ensure you have the proper environment variables configured.

The flow from code change to testing in Airflow should look like this (this assumes there is already a DAG for that task):

  1. Commit and push your code to the remote branch.
  2. Run make init-airflow to spin up the postgres db container and init the Airflow tables, it will also create a generic Admin user. You will get an error if Docker is not running.
  3. Run make airflow to spin up Airflow and attach a shell to one of the containers
  4. Open a web browser and navigate to localhost:8080 to see your own local webserver. A generic Admin user is automatically created for you in MR airflow instances with the username and password set to admin.
  5. In the airflow shell, run a command to trigger the DAG/Task you want to test, for example airflow run snowflake_load snowflake-load 2019-01-01 (as configured in the docker-compose file, all kube pods will be created in the testing namespace). Or if you want to run an entire DAG (for instance the dbt DAG to test the branching logic), the command would be something like airflow backfill dbt -s 2019-01-01T00:00:00 -e 2019-01-01T00:00:00.
  6. Once the job is finished, you can navigate to the DAG/Task instance to review the logs.

There is also a make help command that describes what commands exist and what they do.

Some gotchas:

Video Walk Throughs

Troubleshooting Local Airflow Config

No Such File or Directory: 'Users/(user)/google-cloud-sdk-bin/gcloud'

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/Users/(user)/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud': '/Users/(user)/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud'

This is because the default install location for the Google Cloud SDK on a Mac is now the above, but on linux, and in containers it is installed to /usr/lib/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud. This value is passed to the container from the /.kube/config file.

To correct this error all you need to do is edit your /.kube/config and update the command path parameter to where it will be in the container: /usr/lib/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud That file gets updated everytime you install the SDK or run this command: gcloud container clusters get-credentials data-ops. See related issue for more info

Project variables

Our current implementation uses the following project variables:

The following flavors are defined:

The following variables are set at the job level depending on the running environment and should not be set in the project settings.

Airflow Monitoring and Alerting

Monitoring

Alerting

Common Airflow and Kubernetes Tasks

Tips

Debugging Airflow Problems

Sometimes things break and it's not clear what's happening. Here are some common things to check.

Semi-common Problems

Connecting to the Kubernetes Airflow Cluster:

  1. Install Kubectl

  2. Connect it to the data team cluster by running -> gcloud container clusters get-credentials data-ops --zone us-west1-a --project gitlab-analysis

  3. Run kubectl get pods and make sure it returns successfully

  4. ALL OF YOUR COMMANDS TOUCH PRODUCTION, THERE IS CURRENTLY NO TESTING ENVIRONMENT IN Kubernetes. The canonical way to test is to use the local docker-compose setup.

Access Airflow Webserver UI

Updating Airflow

View Resources

View Persistent Volumes

Restart Deployment and Pods

The resource manifests for kubernetes live in airflow-image/manifests/. To create or update these resources in kubernetes first run kubectl delete deployment airflow-deployment and then run kubectl apply -f <manifest-file.yaml>. Because we are using a persistent volume that can only be claimed by one pod at a time we can't use the usual kubectl apply -f for modifications. A fresh deployment must be set up each time.

Access Shell with Pod

Updating Secrets

Stopping a Running DAG

Running specific tasks within a DAG

Setting/Changing an Airflow variable

Managing Persistent Volume Claim and its Data

The persistent volume claim for Airflow is defined in the persistent_volume.yaml manifest. It is used in the deployment for logs and writes to the /usr/local/airflow/logs directory. If the persistent volume claim is full, there are two solutions:

Deleting Data
Increase Claim Size

Alternatively, you can update the persistent_volume.yaml definition in the project. However, redeploying this may delete the data already in the claim. This has not been tested yet.

Meltano

We run Meltano in its own Kubernetes cluster with in the meltano namespace. The primary project is https://gitlab.com/gitlab-data/meltano-gitlab which is a fork of https://github.com/Mashey/gitlab-meltano.

The kubernetes cluster is running GCP as meltano-gitlab.

The UI of Meltano is not exposed to internet. To view the logs we have to look in the kubernetes container logs. It can be found under "LOGS" tab or under the overview page by selecting the meltano-gitlab cluster under workloads.

To update what extractors are being used, update the meltano.yml file in the main project. Add a git tag after the change is merged and update the gitlab-app.yml kubernetes manifest to point to the new image.

Meltano uses Airflow internally and we use Cloud SQL as the metadata database. The meltano-gitlab database.

#Connect to the Kubernetes cluster from local(Prerequisites is Google cloud SDK installed). In case the command doesn't work then connect to GCP and select Cluster under Kubernetes and select connect to cluster. It will reveal the latest command. 
gcloud container clusters get-credentials meltano-gitlab --zone us-west1-a --project gitlab-analysis

Many Kubernetes commands are similar to what we use for Airflow, except the flag --namespace=meltano or -n=meltano is used. For example:

# Editing Secrets
$  kubectl edit secrets tap-secrets --namespace=meltano
$  kubectl edit secrets admin-sdk --namespace=meltano
$  kubectl edit secrets cloud-sql --namespace=meltano

# Exec into a container
$  kubectl exec -ti meltano-gitlab-85bf9f958b-bbffl -c gitlab /bin/bash --namespace=meltano

# Applying the updated manifest does NOT require the namespace
$  kubectl apply -f ./gitlab-app.yaml

# Delete the deployment of meltano namespace
kubectl delete deployment meltano-gitlab --namespace=meltano

Watch the video on walkthrough of Meltano setup in GKE

Postgres Pipeline

Development

To add new tables or fields to be pulled by postgres pipeline, the manifest file for the specific source database will need to be changed. These manifest files are in a folder here. To add a new table, add an item to the tables list. The import_db value should match the other items in that manifest. The import_query is executed directly against the source target database. Where possible, make the import query incremental by adding a WHERE clause such as:

WHERE updated_at BETWEEN '{EXECUTION_DATE}'::timestamp - interval '{HOURS} hours'
AND '{EXECUTION_DATE}'::timestamp

The export_schema value should match the other items in the manifest. The export_table value should match the name of the table being imported. The export_table_primary_key should be set to the primary key of that specific table in the postgres database. If the import query is not incremental, then add advanced_metadata: true which creates another column that differentiates when data was loaded.

After the manifest changes are made, create a merge request using the add_manifest_tables template. Then follow the instructions there.

For further details on the technical implementation see the README here

Testing in Airflow

When testing postgres pipeline (pgp) locally in Airflow, there are a few things to keep in mind:

Bash Scripting

Docker

Compose

We use Docker compose to define and run our different images and applications. These are activated by users via the Makefile.

Environment Variables

There are a few environment variables you will need to properly use the Makefile and Docker Compose.

Images

Data

The data_image directory contains everything needed for building and pushing the data-image. If a binary needs to be installed it should be done in the Dockerfile directly, python packages should be added to the requirements.txt file and pinned to a confirmed working version.

Airflow

The airflow_image directory contains everything needed to build and push not only the airflow-image but also the corresponding Kubernetes deployment manifests. The only manual work that needs to be done for a fresh deployment is setting up an airflow secret. The required secrets can be found in airflow_image/manifests/secret.template.yaml.

The default airflow instance is the production instance, it uses the airflow postgres db. The testing instance uses the airflow_testing db.

The default instance logs are stored in gs://gitlab-airflow/prod, the testing instance logs are stored in gs://gitlab-airflow/testing

dbt

The dbt_image directory contains everything needed for building and pushing the data-image. If a binary needs to be installed it should be done in the Dockerfile directly, python packages should be added to the requirements.txt file and pinned to a confirmed working version. As this image is used by Data Analysts there should not be much more than dbt in the image.

Creating New Images

Production images are only built when a git tag is pushed on the master branch. Our current release flow is as follows:

# Either on the master branch or in a feature branch run:
git tag v<sem_ver>

# Push the tag
git push origin $(git describe --tags --abbrev=0)

The build pipelines will automatically run. Make a new MR anywhere these images are referenced to update the tag.

Python Housekeeping

There are multiple make commands and CI jobs designed to help keep the repo's python clean and maintainable. The following commands in the Makefile will help analyze the repo:

Accessing peered VPCs

Some of the GitLab specific ELTs connect to databases which are in peered GCP projects, such as the usage ping. To allow connections, a few actions have been taken:

  1. The Kubernetes cluster where the runner executes has been setup to use IP aliasing, so each pod gets a real routable IP within GCP.
  2. A VPC peering relationship has been established between the two projects and their networks.
  3. A firewall rule has been created in the upstream project to allow access from the runner Kubernetes cluster's pod subnet.

Extractor Documentation

Updating the Runner

We execute our CI jobs in the gitlab-data group with Kubernetes via the gitlab-analysis GCP project. We have a group runner setup to share across all repos.

In the case where a new group runner token needs to be associated, or if we need to update the runner image. These are the basic steps. Note - since the release of helm 3, it is recommended that all of these commands be run in the Cloud Shell console in GCP. Navigate to the deployment for the runner (currently gitlab-data-gitlab-runner) and use the kubectl dropdown to enter the shell.

To get the credentials

gcloud container clusters get-credentials bizops-runner --zone us-west1-a --project gitlab-analysis

To see the helm releases

helm list --namespace <namespace>

To get the chart values for a specific release

helm get values --namespace <namespace> <chartname>

Prep commands

helm repo add <chart> <url>

helm repo update

To delete the runner

helm delete --namespace <namespace> <chartname>

To install the runner with the Helm chart

helm install --namespace <namespace> --name <chartname> -f <valuesfile> <chartrepo/name>

Example for updating the runner version or group token

helm list --namespace gitlab-data
helm get values --namespace gitlab-data gitlab-runner
helm get values --namespace gitlab-data gitlab-runner > values.yaml
helm repo add gitlab https://charts.gitlab.io
helm repo update
helm delete --namespace gitlab-data gitlab-runner
helm install --namespace gitlab-data --name gitlab-runner -f values.yaml gitlab/gitlab-runner

Our YAML configuration is as follows:

affinity: {}
checkInterval: 30
concurrent: 10
gitlabUrl: https://gitlab.com
hostAliases: []
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
metrics:
  enabled: true
nodeSelector: {}
podAnnotations: {}
podLabels: {}
rbac:
  clusterWideAccess: false
  create: false
  podSecurityPolicy:
    enabled: false
    resourceNames:
    - gitlab-runner
  serviceAccountName: gitlab-data-gitlab-runner
resources: {}
runnerRegistrationToken: <token found in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-data/-/settings/ci_cd>
runners:
  builds: {}
  cache: {}
  helpers: {}
  image: ubuntu:16.04
  outputLimit: 4096
  pollTimeout: 180
  privileged: false
  services: {}
  tags: analytics,housekeeping
securityContext:
  fsGroup: 65533
  runAsUser: 100

Automated Processes Loading Data into Snowflake

Version DB and License DB Load Tasks

Source Postgres DB Data Export

There's a once-daily CI job that executes in the version project as well as the license project that runs the database export version script or license script and exports CSV files to a GCS bucket. These files are named gitlab-version-{table_name}-{monday_of_week} or gitlab-license-{table_name}-{monday_of_week} respectively.

Snowflake Stage

The GCS bucket where the version DB CSV files are being exported is setup in Snowflake as the stage raw.version_db.version_dump. The GCS bucket where the license DB files are exported is setup as the stage raw.license_db.license_dump. This means from Snowflake, we can list all of the files, copy the data in the files into tables, and even delete files.

Column Matching and Table Generation

The CSV files are not self-describing. They do not have a column header to know what column is in which position. Because of this, the tables in RAW need to have columns in order that exactly match what order the CSVs are in. In order to easily create the tables, this bash script was created. In order to generate the create statements:

  1. Uncomment the declare statement of the desired database
  2. Set the PATH_TO_MANIFESTS environment variable to have the path to your cloned version of the source sql folder. For version db it should point to your cloned version of this folder. For license db it should point to this folder.
  3. Execute do_create_tables.sh and it should print out all of the create table statements.

Snowflake Tasks

The CSV files are being loaded daily from the Snowflake stage with snowflake tasks. The tasks were generated running SQL such as

create or replace task users_load_task
       WAREHOUSE = LOADING
       SCHEDULE = '1440 minute'
       AS 
        COPY INTO users
        from @raw.version_db.version_dump/gitlab-version-users-
        file_format = (TYPE = CSV FIELD_OPTIONALLY_ENCLOSED_BY='"')

with the LOADER role. These tasks run daily and load only new or updated files. To see the task definitions, you can run show tasks as the LOADER role with the version_db or license_db schema as part of the context.

Task Monitoring

The tasks are being monitored with a dbt test that makes sure each task has ran successfully in the last day. The version test and license test can be found in the internal data-tests project here and here respectively. In order to diagnose problems with the tasks, you can query the raw.snowflake.task_history_view and inspect the error_message column on failed tasks.

PTO by Roots Snowpipe

As described in this issue, there is a process maintained by the people group that periodically queries the PTO by Roots API and dumps the results into a JSON file in the gitlab-pto GCS bucket. This bucket is in the gitlab-analysis GCP project.

To load this data into Snowflake, a Snowpipe for GCS was configured using this Snowflake documentation. A GCP pubsub topic named gitlab-pto-snowpipe was configured to receive a new message whenever a new file was written to the gitlab-pto bucket. A GCP Pub/Sub subscription named gitlab-pto-snowpipe with delivery type Pull was created to subscribe to the gitlab-pto-snowpipe topic.

Then, a notification integration was created in Snowflake with the following command:

create notification integration pto_snowpipe_integration
    type = queue
    notification_provider = gcp_pubsub
    enabled = true
    gcp_pubsub_subscription_name = 'projects/gitlab-analysis/subscriptions/gitlab-pto-snowpipe';

The Snowpipe was then created using this command:

CREATE OR REPLACE PIPE raw.pto.gitlab_pto
    AUTO_INGEST = true
    INTEGRATION = 'PTO_SNOWPIPE_INTEGRATION'
    AS copy into raw.pto.gitlab_pto (jsontext, uploaded_at)
    from (select $1, current_timestamp() as uploaded_at from @raw.pto.pto_load)
    file_format=(type='json' strip_outer_array = true);

The Snowpipe was enabled so it successfully picks up any new files written to the gitlab-pto bucket:

alter pipe raw.pto.gitlab_pto enable;

Debugging

If there are any issues with the PTO snowpipe, check the status of the Snowpipe first. This can be done in Snowflake by running

select SYSTEM$PIPE_STATUS('gitlab_pto');

Demandbase Load Tasks

The Demandbase data load was implemented as part of this issue. Demandbase data is loaded daily, by Demandbase, in parquet format into a GCS bucket owned by Demandbase named datastream-hosted-gitlab-3750. GitLab's Snowflake-GCS integration service account was granted permission to read and list files within this bucket to load data from Demandbase into Snowflake.

A Snowflake stage was created to interface with the Demandbase data:

CREATE STAGE "RAW".demandbase.data_stream 
STORAGE_INTEGRATION = GCS_INTEGRATION 
URL = 'gcs://datastream-hosted-gitlab-3750/datastream-gitlab/';

After, a Snowflake task for each demandbase relation was created to load from GCS into the Snowflake RAW database. For example, the Snowflake task loading accounts was defined with:

create task demandbase_account_load_task
       WAREHOUSE = LOADING
       SCHEDULE = '1440 minute'
       AS 
copy into raw.demandbase.account (jsontext, uploaded_at) 
    from (select $1, current_timestamp() as uploaded_at from @raw.demandbase.data_stream/db1_accounts/)
    file_format=(type='parquet');

Then the task was enabled by running alter task DEMANDBASE_ACCOUNT_LOAD_TASK resume;. Each task continues to run daily and loads any new files from GCS into the Snowflake raw.demandbase schema.

Thanos Load Tasks

There is a process setup as part of this issue that pulls thanos metrics daily and writes them to a GCS bucket.

To pull the metrics into Snowflake from GCS, a stage was created:

CREATE STAGE "RAW"."PROMETHEUS".periodic_queries 
STORAGE_INTEGRATION = GCS_INTEGRATION URL = 'gcs://periodic-queries/';

A Snowflake task was then setup to load the new data files in daily:

create or replace task prometheus_load_task
       WAREHOUSE = LOADING
       SCHEDULE = '1440 minute'
       AS 
    copy into raw.prometheus.periodic_queries (jsontext, uploaded_at)
    from (select $1, current_timestamp() as uploaded_at from @raw.prometheus.periodic_queries)
    file_format=(type='json');

Data Refresh

Stitch-Managed Data

If a full refresh is required due to a failing test leading to an SLO breach, take time to investigate the root cause of the failing test. Make an incident and document any findings before triggering the full refresh. It may also be useful to copy the data to another temporary table to allow the full refresh to continue unimpeded.

For data sources extracted by Stitch (see extraction table on the platform page), the recommended way to do a full refresh is as follows:

  create schema clone_<DATA_SCHEMA> clone <DATA_SCHEMA>;

SELECT
 'truncate table if exists clone_<DATA_SCHEMA>.' || LOWER(table_name) || ';'
FROM "RAW"."INFORMATION_SCHEMA".tables
WHERE LOWER(table_schema) = '<DATA_SCHEMA>';

SELECT
 'ALTER TABLE <DATA_SCHEMA>.' || LOWER(table_name) || ' SWAP WITH clone_<DATA_SCHEMA>.' || LOWER(table_name) || ';'
FROM "RAW"."INFORMATION_SCHEMA".tables
WHERE LOWER(table_schema) = '<DATA_SCHEMA>';

dbt models full refresh

Use dbt_full_refresh DAG to force dbt to rebuild the entire incremental model from scratch.

  1. In Airflow set up Variable DBT_MODEL_TO_FULL_REFRESH with name of model(s) to refresh following dbt model selection syntax. For example, to refresh version models, the value would be sources.version staging.version. To refresh gitlab_dotcom models, the value would be sources.gitlab_dotcom staging.gitlab_dotcom.
    airflow_variable_setting</br>
  2. Turn on and trigger DAG to run.

dbt command that is run behind is

dbt run --profiles-dir profile --target prod --models DBT_MODEL_TO_FULL_REFRESH --full-refresh

GitLab Data Utilities

This is a project for centralizing handy functions we use across the team. Project is https://gitlab.com/gitlab-data/gitlab-data-utils

Cutting a release

  1. Increment the minor version in setup.py. The minor version is the second number, i.e. 1 in 0.1.0. Currently, updating only the minor version is supported.
  2. Make an MR for this change and get it merged into master.
  3. Checkout and pull master locally so you have the version change you just made. From the root folder of gitlab-data-utils, run make release, this will make sure you don't have any pending changes and will push a new tag to the GitLab repo. This in turn will run the pipeline to publish to pypi.
  4. For consistency with pypi, cut a GitLab release with a command similar to this: 
     curl --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: <your-private-token>" \
  --data '{ "name": "GitLab Data Utilities v0.0.1", "tag_name": "v0.0.1", "description": "Initial tagged release"}' \
  --request POST https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/12846518/releases
  5. Update the docker image as was done in this merge request

Upgrading dbt for production

  1. Have an issue ready with key stakeholders alerted as to the timing of the upgrade. Give at least one day notice before moving forward with the upgrade
  2. Create a new dbt-image version following the instructions in the Creating New Images section
  3. Make an MR to the analytics project and update the following items. See this MR for an example
    • dbt-image in the following places:
    • airflow_utils.py
    • dbt_project.yml
    • snowflake-dbt-ci.yml
    • .gitlab-ci.yml
    • docker-compose.yml * any packages in packages.yml * index.html by doing the following:
    • load the docs site using the command make dbt-docs
    • view the source code for the page by either right-clicking and selecting "View Page Source", or hitting "CMD + u" on a Mac or "CTRL + u" on Linux
    • update everything from <body> to the bottom of the file
    • confirm there are no major changes in the code from </head> to the top of the file
  4. Make an MR in the data-tests project to update the image version and require-dbt-version. See this MR for an example
  5. Run relevant dbt jobs based on any feature updates for the release
  6. Once merged, notify everyone of the upgrade and monitor for any failing jobs or user issues
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