Moldova broke our data pipeline
3 days ago
- #CSV-issues
- #data-sanitization
- #data-replication
- DMS replication failed due to unquoted field values in CSV files, specifically with 'Moldova, Republic of' causing Redshift to misinterpret columns.
- Initial quick fixes like renaming records in the source database were ineffective as Shopify's API would resend the original problematic data.
- A better solution involved sanitizing country names at the sync job level by replacing commas with hyphens to ensure CSV safety and idempotency.
- More robust solutions included changing the CSV delimiter to a pipe or tab or switching to Parquet format for better handling of special characters.
- The article emphasizes the importance of sanitizing and validating external data at the point of ingestion to prevent downstream issues.
- A combination of switching to Parquet for DMS replication and sanitizing data at the sync boundary was recommended as the best practice.