Overview

In this lab, you:

• Implement a pipeline that has branches.
• Filter data before writing.
• Add custom command-line parameters to a pipeline.

Prerequisites:

• Basic familiarity with Python.

In the previous lab, you created a basic Extract-Transform-Load sequential pipeline and used an equivalent Dataflow Template to ingest batch data storage on Google Cloud Storage. This pipeline consists of a sequence of transformations:

Many pipelines will not exhibit such simple structure, though. In this lab, you build a more sophisticated, non-sequential pipeline.

The use case here is to optimize resource consumption. Products vary with respect to how they consume resources. Additionally, not all data is used in the same way within a business; some data will be regularly queried, for example, within analytic workloads, and some data will only be used for recovery. In this lab, you optimize the pipeline from the first lab for resource consumption, by storing only data that analysts will use in BigQuery while archiving other data in a very low-cost, highly durable storage service: Coldline storage in Google Cloud Storage.

Setup and requirements

For each lab, you get a new Google Cloud project and set of resources for a fixed time at no cost.

1. Sign in to Qwiklabs using an incognito window.

2. Note the lab's access time (for example, 1:15:00), and make sure you can finish within that time.
   There is no pause feature. You can restart if needed, but you have to start at the beginning.

3. When ready, click Start lab.

4. Note your lab credentials (Username and Password). You will use them to sign in to the Google Cloud Console.

5. Click Open Google Console.

6. Click Use another account and copy/paste credentials for this lab into the prompts.
   If you use other credentials, you'll receive errors or incur charges.

7. Accept the terms and skip the recovery resource page.

Check project permissions

Before you begin your work on Google Cloud, you need to ensure that your project has the correct permissions within Identity and Access Management (IAM).

1. In the Google Cloud console, on the Navigation menu (), select IAM & Admin > IAM.

2. Confirm that the default compute Service Account {project-number}-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com is present and has the editor role assigned. The account prefix is the project number, which you can find on Navigation menu > Cloud Overview > Dashboard.

1. In the Google Cloud console, on the Navigation menu, click Cloud Overview > Dashboard.
2. Copy the project number (e.g. 729328892908).
3. On the Navigation menu, select IAM & Admin > IAM.
4. At the top of the roles table, below View by Principals, click Grant Access.
5. For New principals, type:

6. Replace {project-number} with your project number.
7. For Role, select Project (or Basic) > Editor.
8. Click Save.

Jupyter notebook-based development environment setup

For this lab, you will be running all commands in a terminal from your notebook.

1. In the Google Cloud Console, on the Navigation Menu, click Vertex AI > Workbench.

2. Click Enable Notebooks API.

3. On the Workbench page, select USER-MANAGED NOTEBOOKS and click CREATE NEW.

4. In the New instance dialog box that appears, set the region to and zone to .

5. For Environment, select Apache Beam.

6. Click CREATE at the bottom of the dialog vox.

7. Once the environment is ready, click the OPEN JUPYTERLAB link next to your Notebook name. This will open up your environment in a new tab in your browser.

8. Next, click Terminal. This will open up a terminal where you can run all the commands in this lab.

Download Code Repository

Next you will download a code repository for use in this lab.

1. In the terminal you just opened, enter the following:

2. On the left panel of your notebook environment, in the file browser, you will notice the training-data-analyst repo added.

3. Navigate into the cloned repo /training-data-analyst/quests/dataflow_python/. You will see a folder for each lab, which is further divided into a lab sub-folder with code to be completed by you, and a solution sub-folder with a fully workable example to reference if you get stuck.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective. Create notebook instance and clone course repo

Multiple transforms process the same PCollection

In this lab, you write a branching pipeline that writes data to both Google Cloud Storage and to BigQuery.

One way of writing a branching pipeline is to apply two different transforms to the same PCollection, resulting in two different PCollections:

Implementing a branching pipeline

If you get stuck in this or later sections, the solution is available from the Google Cloud training-data-analyst page.

Task 1. Add a branch to write to Cloud Storage

To complete this task, modify an existing pipeline by adding a branch that writes to Cloud Storage.

Open the appropriate lab

• In the terminal in your IDE environment, and run the following commands:

Setting up virtual environment and dependencies

Before you can begin editing the actual pipeline code, you need to ensure that you have installed the necessary dependencies.

1. In the terminal in your IDE environment, run the commands below create a virtual environment for your work in this lab:

2. Next, install the packages you will need to execute your pipeline:

3. Finally, ensure that the Dataflow API is enabled:

Set up the data environment

1. Open up my_pipeline.py in your IDE, which can be found in training-data-analyst/quests/dataflow_python/2_Branching_Pipelines/labs/.

2. Scroll down to the run() method, where the body of the pipeline is defined. It currently looks as follows:

3. Modify this code by adding a new branching transform that writes to Cloud Storage using textio.WriteToText before each element is converted from json to dict.

If you get stuck in this or later sections, refer to the solution, which can be found on the Google Cloud training-data-analyst page.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective. Set up the data environment

Task 2. Filter data by field

At the moment, the new pipeline doesn’t actually consume fewer resources, since all data are being stored twice. To start improving resource consumption, we need to reduce the amount of duplicated data.

The Google Cloud Storage bucket is intended to function as archival and backup storage, so it’s important that all data be stored there. However, not all data necessarily need to be sent to BigQuery.

1. Let’s assume that data analysts often look at what resources users access on the website, and how those access patterns differ as a function of geography and time. Only a subset of the fields would be necessary. Since we have parsed the JSON elements into dictionaries, we can easily use the pop method to drop a field from within a Python callable:

2. To complete this task, use a Python callable with beam.Map to drop the field user_agent, which our analysts will not be using in BigQuery.

Task 3. Filter data by element

There are many ways of filtering in Apache Beam. Since we are working with a PCollection of Python dictionaries, the easiest manner will be to leverage a lambda (anonymous) function as our filter, a function returning a boolean value, with beam.Filter. For example:

• To complete this task, add a beam.Filter transform to the pipeline. You may filter on whatever criteria you wish, but as a suggestion, try eliminating rows where num_bytes is greater than or equal to 120.

Task 4. Adding custom command-line parameters

The pipeline currently has a number of parameters hard-coded into it, including the path to the input and the location of the table in BigQuery. However, the pipeline would be more useful if it could read any JSON file in Cloud Storage. Adding this feature requires adding to the set of command-line parameters.

Currently, we use an ArgumentParser to read in and parse command-line arguments. We then pass these arguments into the PipelineOptions() object we specify when creating our pipeline:

The PipelineOptions is used to interpret the options being read by the ArgumentParser. To add a new command-line argument to the parser, we can use the syntax:

To access a command-line parameter in code, parse the arguments and refer to the field in the resulting dictionary:

• To complete this task, add command-line parameters for the input path, the Google Cloud Storage output path, and the BigQuery table name, and update the pipeline code to access those parameters instead of constants.

Task 5. Add nullable fields to your pipeline

You may have noticed that the BigQuery table created in the last lab had a schema with all REQUIRED fields like this:

It may be desirable to create an Apache Beam schema with NULLABLE fields where data is missing, both for the pipeline execution itself and then for the resulting BigQuery table.

We can update the JSON BigQuery schema by adding a new property mode for a field we wish to be nullable:

• To complete this task, mark the lat and lon fields as nullable in the BigQuery schema.

Task 6. Run your pipeline from the command line

• To complete this task, run your pipeline from the command line and pass the appropriate parameters. Remember to take note of the resulting BigQuery schema for NULLABLE fields. Your code should look something like this:

Task 7. Verify the pipeline’s results

1. Navigate to the Dataflow Jobs page and look at the job as it’s running. Its graph should resemble the following:

2. Click on the node representing your Filter function, which in the above picture is called FilterFn. In the panel that appears on the right-hand side, you should see that more elements were added as inputs than were written as outputs.

3. Now click on the node representing the write to Cloud Storage. Since all elements were written, this number should agree with the number of elements in the input to the Filter function.

4. Once the pipeline has finished, examine the results in BigQuery by querying your table. Note that the number of records in the table should agree with the number of elements that were output by the Filter function.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective. Run your pipeline from the command line

End your lab

When you have completed your lab, click End Lab. Google Cloud Skills Boost removes the resources you’ve used and cleans the account for you.

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