Overview

In this lab, you will learn how to:

• Build a batch Extract-Transform-Load pipeline in Apache Beam, which takes raw data from Google Cloud Storage and writes it to BigQuery.
• Run the Apache Beam pipeline on Dataflow.
• Parameterize the execution of the pipeline.

Prerequisites:

• Basic familiarity with Python.

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

Apache Beam and Dataflow

About 5 minutes

Dataflow is a fully-managed Google Cloud service for running batch and streaming Apache Beam data processing pipelines.

Apache Beam is an open source, advanced, unified, and portable data processing programming model that allows end users to define both batch and streaming data-parallel processing pipelines using Java, Python, or Go. Apache Beam pipelines can be executed on your local development machine on small datasets, and at scale on Dataflow. However, because Apache Beam is open source, other runners exist — you can run Beam pipelines on Apache Flink and Apache Spark, among others.

Lab part 1. Writing an ETL pipeline from scratch

Introduction

In this section, you write an Apache Beam Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) pipeline from scratch.

Dataset and use case review

For each lab in this quest, the input data is intended to resemble web server logs in Common Log format along with other data that a web server might contain. For this first lab, the data is treated as a batch source; in later labs, the data will be treated as a streaming source. Your task is to read the data, parse it, and then write it to BigQuery, a serverless data warehouse, for later data analysis.

Open the appropriate lab

• Return to the terminal in your IDE, and copy and paste the following command:

Set up the 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, 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:

Write your first pipeline

1 hour

Task 1. Generate synthetic data

1. Run the following command in the terminal to clone a repository containing scripts for generating synthetic web server logs:

The script creates a file called events.json containing lines resembling the following:

It then automatically copies this file to your Google Cloud Storage bucket at .

2. In another browser tab, navigate to Google Cloud Storage and confirm that your storage bucket contains a file called events.json.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective. Generate synthetic data

Task 2. Read data from your source

If you get stuck in this or later sections, you can refer to the solution.

1. In your file explorer, navigate to the lab folder 1_Basic_ETL/lab and click my_pipeline.py. This will open the file in an editor panel. Make sure the following packages are imported:

2. Scroll down to the run() method. This method currently contains a pipeline that doesn’t do anything; note how a Pipeline object is created using a PipelineOptions object and the final line of the method runs the pipeline:

• All data in Apache Beam pipelines reside in PCollections. To create your pipeline’s initial PCollection, you will need to apply a root transform to your pipeline object. A root transform creates a PCollection from either an external data source or some local data you specify.

• There are two kinds of root transforms in the Beam SDKs: Read and Create. Read transforms read data from an external source, such as a text file or a database table. Create transforms create a PCollection from an in-memory list and are especially useful for testing.

The following example code shows how to apply a ReadFromText root transform to read data from a text file. The transform is applied to a Pipeline object, p, and returns a pipeline dataset in the form of a PCollection[str] (using notation coming from parameterized type hints). "ReadLines" is your name for the transform, which will be helpful later when working with larger pipelines.

3. Inside the run() method, create a string constant called “input” and set its value to gs://<YOUR-PROJECT-ID>/events.json. In a future lab, you will use command-line parameters to pass this information.

4. Create a PCollection of strings of all the events in events.json by calling the textio.ReadFromText transform.

5. Add any appropriate import statements to the top of my_pipeline.py.

6. To save your work, click on File and select Save in the top navigation menu.

Task 3. Run your pipeline to verify that it works

• Return to the terminal, and return to the $BASE_DIR folder and execute the following commands. Be sure to set the PROJECT_ID environment variable before running the pipeline:

At the moment, your pipeline doesn’t actually do anything; it simply reads in data.

However, running it demonstrates a useful workflow, in which you verify the pipeline locally and cheaply using DirectRunner running on your local machine before doing more expensive computations. To run the pipeline using Google Dataflow, you may change runner to DataflowRunner.

Task 4. Add in a transformation

If you get stuck, refer to the solution.

Transforms are what change your data. In Apache Beam, transforms are done by the PTransform class. At runtime, these operations will be performed on a number of independent workers.

The input and output to every PTransform is a PCollection. In fact, though you may not have realized it, you have already used a PTransform when you read in data from Google Cloud Storage. Whether or not you assigned it to a variable, this created a PCollection of strings.

Because Beam uses a generic apply method for PCollections, represented by the pipe operator | in Python, you can chain transforms sequentially. For example, you can chain transforms to create a sequential pipeline, like this one:

For this task, you will use a new sort of transform, a ParDo. ParDo is a Beam transform for generic parallel processing.

The ParDo processing paradigm is similar to the “Map” phase of a Map/Shuffle/Reduce-style algorithm: a ParDo transform considers each element in the input PCollection, performs some processing function (your user code) on that element, and emits zero, one, or multiple elements to an output PCollection.

ParDo is useful for a variety of common data processing operations, however there are special PTransforms in Python to make the process simpler, including:

• Filtering a dataset. You can use Filter to consider each element in a PCollection and either output that element to a new PCollection, or discard it depending on the output of a Python callable which returns a boolean value.
• Formatting or type-converting each element in a dataset. If your input PCollection contains elements that are of a different type or format than you want, you can use Map to perform a conversion on each element and output the result to a new PCollection.
• Extracting parts of each element in a dataset. If you have a PCollection of records with multiple fields, for example, you can also use Map or FlatMap to parse out just the fields you want to consider into a new PCollection.
• Performing computations on each element in a dataset. You can use ParDo, Map, or FlatMap to perform simple or complex computations on every element, or certain elements, of a PCollection and output the results as a new PCollection.

To complete this task, you need to write a Map transform that reads in a JSON string representing a single event, parses it using the Python json package, and outputs the dictionary returned by json.loads.

Map functions can be implemented in two ways, either inline or via a predefined callable. You write inline Map functions like this:

Alternatively, beam.Map can be used with a Python callable defined earlier in the script:

If you need more flexibility, than beam.Map (and other lightweight DoFns) offers, then you can implement ParDo with custom DoFns that subclass DoFn. This allows them to be more easily integrated with testing frameworks.

Remember, if you get stuck, refer to the solution.

Task 5. Write to a sink

At this point, your pipeline reads a file from Google Cloud Storage, parses each line, and emits a Python dictionary for each element. The next step is to write these objects into a BigQuery table.

1. While you can instruct your pipeline to create a BigQuery table if needed, you will need to create the dataset ahead of time. This has already been done by the generate_batch_events.sh script. You can examine the dataset using the following code:

To output your pipeline’s final PCollections, you apply a Write transform to that PCollection. Write transforms can output the elements of a PCollection to an external data sink, such as a database table. You can use Write to output a PCollection at any time in your pipeline, although you’ll typically write out data at the end of your pipeline.

The following example code shows how to apply a WriteToText transform to write a PCollection of string to a text file:

2. In this case, instead of using WriteToText, use WriteToBigQuery.

This function requires a number of things to be specified, including the specific table to write to and the schema of this table. You can optionally specify whether to append to an existing table, recreate existing tables (helpful in early pipeline iteration), or create the table if it doesn't exist. By default, this transform will create tables that don't exist and won't write to a non-empty table.

3. However, we do need to specify our schema. There are two ways to do this. We can specify the schema as a single string or in JSON format. For example, suppose our dictionary has three fields: name (of type str), ID (of type int) and balance (of type float). Then we can specify the schema in a single line:

Or specify it as JSON:

In the first case (the single string), all fields are assumed to be NULLABLE. We can specify the mode if we use the JSON approach instead.

4. Once we have defined the table schema, then we can add the sink to our DAG:

Remember to define the table schema and add the BigQuery sink to your pipeline. Remember, if you get stuck, refer to the solution.

Task 6. Run your pipeline

1. Return to the terminal, and run your pipeline using almost the same command as earlier. However, now use the DataflowRunner to run the pipeline on Dataflow.

The overall shape should be a single path, starting with the Read transform and ending with the Write transform. As your pipeline runs, workers will be added automatically, as the service determines the needs of your pipeline, and then disappear when they are no longer needed. You can observe this by navigating to Compute Engine, where you should see virtual machines created by the Dataflow service.

2. Once your pipeline has finished, return to the BigQuery browser window and query your table.

If your code isn’t performing as expected and you don’t know what to do, check out the solution.

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

Lab part 2. Parameterizing basic ETL

Approximately 20 minutes

Much of the work of data engineers is either predictable, like recurring jobs, or it’s similar to other work. However, the process for running pipelines requires engineering expertise. Think back to the steps that you just completed:

1. You created a development environment and developed a pipeline. The environment included the Apache Beam SDK and other dependencies.
2. You executed the pipeline from the development environment. The Apache Beam SDK staged files in Cloud Storage, created a job request file, and submitted the file to the Dataflow service.

It would be much better if there were a way to initiate a job through an API call or without having to set up a development environment (which non-technical users would be unable to do). This would also allow you to run pipelines.

Dataflow Templates seek to solve this problem by changing the representation that is created when a pipeline is compiled so that it is parameterizable. Unfortunately, it is not as simple as exposing command-line parameters, although that is something you do in a later lab. With Dataflow Templates, the workflow above becomes:

1. Developers create a development environment and develop their pipeline. The environment includes the Apache Beam SDK and other dependencies.
2. Developers execute the pipeline and create a template. The Apache Beam SDK stages files in Cloud Storage, creates a template file (similar to job request), and saves the template file in Cloud Storage.
3. Non-developer users or other workflow tools like Airflow can easily execute jobs with the Google Cloud console, gcloud command-line tool, or the REST API to submit template file execution requests to the Dataflow service.

In this lab, you will practice using one of the many Google-created Dataflow Templates to accomplish the same task as the pipeline that you built in Part 1.

Task 1. Create a JSON schema file

Just like before, you must pass the Dataflow Template a JSON file representing the schema in this example.

1. Return to the terminal in your IDE. Run the following commands to navigate back to the main directory, then grab the schema from your existing logs.logs table:

2. Now, capture this output in a file and upload to GCS. The extra sed commands are to build a full JSON object that Dataflow will expect.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective. Creating a JSON schema file

Task 2. Write a JavaScript user-defined function

The Cloud Storage to BigQuery Dataflow Template requires a JavaScript function to convert the raw text into valid JSON. In this case, each line of text is valid JSON, so the function is somewhat trivial.

1. To complete this task, create a New File in the dataflow_python folder in the file explorer of your IDE.

2. To create New File, click on File >> New >> Text File.

3. Rename the file name as transform.js, to rename the file name right click on it.

4. Open transform.js file in the editor panel, click on the file to open it.

5. Copy the function below to the transform.js file and save it:

6. Then run the following to copy the file to Google Cloud Storage:

Click Check my progress to verify the objective. Write a JavaScript user-defined function in Javascript file

Task 3. Run a Dataflow Template

1. Go to the Dataflow Web UI.
2. Click CREATE JOB FROM TEMPLATE.
3. Enter a Job name for your Dataflow job.
4. Under Dataflow template, select the Text Files on Cloud Storage to BigQuery template under the Process Data in Bulk (batch) section, NOT the Streaming section.
5. Under Cloud Storage Input File, enter the path to events.json in the form
6. Under Cloud Storage location of your BigQuery schema file, write the path to your schema.json file, in the form
7. Under BigQuery output table, enter
8. Under Temporary BigQuery directory, enter a new folder within this same bucket. The job will create it for you.
9. Under Temporary location, enter a second new folder within this same bucket.
10. Leave Encryption at Google-managed encryption key.
11. Click to open Optional Prameters.
12. Under JavaScript UDF path in Cloud Storage, enter in the path to your .js, in the form
13. Under JavaScript UDF name, enter transform.
14. Click the Run job button.

While your job is running, you may inspect it from within the Dataflow Web UI.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective. Running a Dataflow Template

Task 4. Inspect the Dataflow Template code

The code for the Dataflow Template you just used is located in this TextIOToBigQuery guide.

• Scroll down to the main method. The code should look familiar to the pipeline you authored!

  • It begins with a Pipeline object, created using a PipelineOptions object.
  • It consists of a chain of PTransforms, beginning with a TextIO.read() transform.
  • The PTransform after the read transform is a bit different; it allows one to use Javascript to transform the input strings if, for example, the source format doesn’t align well with the BigQuery table format; for documentation on how to use this feature, see this page.
  • The PTransform after the Javascript UDF uses a library function to convert the Json into a tablerow; you can inspect that code here.
  • The write PTransform looks a bit different because instead of making use of a schema that is known at graph compile-time, the code is intended to accept parameters that will only be known at run-time. The NestedValueProvider class is what makes this possible.

Make sure to check out the next lab, which will cover making pipelines that are not simply chains of PTransforms, and how you can adapt a pipeline you’ve built to be a custom Dataflow Template.

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.

You will be given an opportunity to rate the lab experience. Select the applicable number of stars, type a comment, and then click Submit.

The number of stars indicates the following:

• 1 star = Very dissatisfied
• 2 stars = Dissatisfied
• 3 stars = Neutral
• 4 stars = Satisfied
• 5 stars = Very satisfied

You can close the dialog box if you don't want to provide feedback.

For feedback, suggestions, or corrections, please use the Support tab.

Copyright 2022 Google LLC All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google LLC. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.