Hi, We have a batch processing application that reads logs files over multiple days, does transformations and aggregations on them using Spark and saves various intermediate outputs to Parquet. These jobs take many hours to run. This pipeline is deployed at many customer sites with some site specific variations.
When we want to make changes to this data pipeline, we delete all the intermediate output and recompute from the point of change. On some sites, we hand write a series of "migration" transformations so we do not have to spend hours recomputing. The reason for changes might be bugs we have found in our data transformations or new features added to the pipeline. As you can probably tell, maintaining all these versions and figuring out what migrations to perform is a headache. What would be ideal is when we apply an updated pipeline, we can automatically figure out which columns need to be recomputed and which can be left as is. Is there a best practice in the Spark ecosystem for this problem? Perhaps some metadata system/data lineage system we can use? I'm curious if this is a common problem that has already been addressed. Thanks, Ashwin