10 Proven Strategies to Prevent Data Pipeline Breakage

Updated September 05th, 2023
How to prevent your data pipelines from breaking

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A data pipeline is a set of processes and tools that move data from one system to another, often involving stages of collection, processing, storage, and analysis.

However, as these pipelines grow in complexity and scale, the risks associated with potential breakage and failure also increase exponentially. A single glitch can compromise the integrity of your entire data flow, leading to inaccurate analytics, loss of crucial information, and even downtime in business operations.

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In this article, we will learn 10 proven strategies to prevent data pipeline breakage. By implementing these measures, you can safeguard your data’s quality and reliability, enabling more accurate and timely decision-making processes for your organization.

In order to know more about data pipelines check out this article → Data Pipeline Monitoring: A Necessity for Modern Data Teams

Table of contents

  1. Data pipeline breakage: How does it impact?
  2. 10 ways to prevent your data pipelines from breaking
  3. 10 noticeable causes of data pipeline breakage
  4. How to fix your broken data pipelines in just 10 steps?
  5. What are the pitfalls of the data pipeline?
  6. Summarizing it all together
  7. How to prevent data pipeline breakage: Related reads

Data pipeline breakage: How does it impact?

A data pipeline is a set of data processing elements connected in series, where the output of one element is the input of the next.

In the context of data science and software engineering, data pipelines are commonly used to automate workflows that involve data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) for analysis, reporting, or other uses.

A “data pipeline breakage” refers to any event where this flow of data is interrupted, compromised, or otherwise adversely affected. This can have severe consequences, particularly for businesses that rely on real-time data analytics or automated decision-making systems.

Impact of data pipeline breakage


A broken data pipeline can have various adverse impacts on a business or organization. The repercussions depend on the nature of the pipeline, the data it processes, and how the data is used within the organization. Here are some of the major impacts:

  1. Operational delays: If an organization relies on real-time data to support operations, a break in the data pipeline can cause delays. This could be in processing orders, making decisions, or delivering services.
  2. Loss of data: A broken pipeline might result in data being lost, either temporarily or permanently. This loss can lead to an incomplete or inaccurate view of information.
  3. Inaccurate reporting and analysis: With corrupted, outdated, or missing data, analytics and reports will be inaccurate. Incorrect insights could lead to misguided business decisions.
  4. Loss of revenue: For companies that rely on real-time data for transactions, a break can lead to lost sales or opportunities. For instance, a recommendation engine that doesn’t get updated product data might suggest out-of-stock items to potential customers.
  5. Increased costs: Addressing the cause of the breakage, potential data recovery, or restoring service can lead to unplanned expenses. Additionally, the longer the pipeline is down, the higher the cost, especially if it requires manual intervention or rerouting of tasks.
  6. Customer dissatisfaction: If the pipeline affects customer-facing applications, it could lead to poor user experiences, eroded trust, or even loss of customers.
  7. Compliance and legal risks: In regulated industries or situations where data governance is critical, a broken pipeline can lead to non-compliance with regulations, resulting in legal penalties, fines, or sanctions.
  8. Damaged reputation: If the breakage becomes public knowledge, especially in cases where customer data is lost or compromised, it can harm the organization’s reputation.

10 ways to prevent your data pipelines from breaking

Ensuring the robustness of data pipelines is critical for data reliability, and consistency, and to ultimately support decision-making processes. Data pipelines can break for various reasons such as schema changes, inconsistent data formats, upstream data changes, or even due to network issues.

Here are some best practices to prevent your data pipelines from breaking:

  1. Design for failures
  2. Validation and sanity checks
  3. Monitoring and alerts
  4. Version control
  5. Dependency management
  6. Testing
  7. Documentation and metadata
  8. Isolation
  9. Configuration management
  10. Incremental data processing

Let us understand each of them in detail:

1. Design for failures


  • Idempotency: Make sure your data processing steps are idempotent. This means running the step multiple times produces the same results as running it once, enabling safe retries.
  • Retry mechanisms: Implement automatic retries for transient errors like network glitches. Consider using exponential backoff strategies.

2. Validation and sanity checks


  • Data validation: Add validation rules to ensure the data being ingested into the pipeline meets predefined quality standards.
  • Schema validation: Validate the schema of ingested data, especially when integrating with external systems.

3. Monitoring and alerts


  • Real-time monitoring: Use real-time monitoring tools to keep an eye on pipeline health, performance metrics, and error rates.
  • Alerts: Set up alerting systems to notify relevant teams when something goes wrong.

4. Version control


  • Code: Maintain version control for pipeline code to revert back to a stable version in case of failure.
  • Data: Consider data versioning to go back to a previous state of the data if needed.

5. Dependency management


  • DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graphs): Use DAGs to manage dependencies between different pipeline steps.
  • Job scheduling: Utilize job schedulers like Apache airflow to manage dependencies and failure recovery.

6. Testing


  • Unit tests: Write unit tests for every piece of logic in the pipeline.
  • Integration tests: Perform integration tests to check the compatibility of newly added features with the existing pipeline.

7. Documentation and metadata


  • Documentation: Maintain documentation for your pipeline architecture, transformations, schemas, and dependencies.
  • Metadata management: Use a metadata management solution to keep track of data lineage, schema changes, and transformations.

8. Isolation


  • Environment isolation: Use separate environments (like Dev, QA, Prod) to isolate changes and minimize the risk of breaking the production pipeline.
  • Data isolation: Use techniques like data partitioning to isolate errors to a subset of data.

9. Configuration management


  • Externalize configurations: Store configurations (like database connection strings, API keys, etc.) in a centralized configuration management system, away from code.

10. Incremental data processing


  • Batch and stream: Consider whether batch processing, stream processing, or a hybrid would better suit your needs to minimize the risk of data loss and ensure reliability.
  • Checkpointing: Save checkpoints at regular intervals in your data pipeline to allow for a restart from the point of failure, rather than from scratch.

By following these best practices, you can significantly reduce the chances of your data pipelines breaking, improve the tolerance, and make it easier to recover from errors when they do occur.

10 noticeable causes of data pipeline breakage

There are various reasons why a data pipeline might break or fail to function as expected. Here are some common ones:

  1. Schema changes
  2. Data quality issues
  3. Code errors
  4. Resource constraints
  5. Dependency failures
  6. Changes in data volume
  7. Permission changes
  8. Networking issues
  9. Versioning issues 10.Human errors

Let us understand each of them in detail:

1. Schema changes


If the structure of the data source changes (e.g., a column is added, removed, or renamed in a database), the pipeline might not be able to handle the new format.

When the structure of a data source changes, such as a database column being added, removed, or renamed, the pipeline may break because it expects data in a specific format. If these changes are not reflected in the pipeline’s code, it can result in runtime errors or incorrect data transformation.

2. Data quality issues


Corrupt, missing, or erroneous data can lead to failures in the pipeline. Data quality may change over time or vary across different data sources.

Data quality can encompass a variety of issues like missing values, outliers, duplicates, or even incorrect types. When such data enters the pipeline, it can cause anything from incorrect analytical results to outright pipeline failure if the pipeline is not designed to handle these anomalies.

3. Code errors


Bugs or logical errors in the code can disrupt the pipeline. Programming bugs or logical errors can cause unexpected behaviour in a pipeline. For example, if an algorithm that processes incoming data has a bug, it could cause the entire pipeline to fail, creating bottlenecks in data flow or incorrect outputs.

4. Resource constraints


Lack of sufficient computational resources like CPU, memory, or disk space can lead to failures. Data pipelines often run on servers that have limited computational resources (CPU, RAM, disk space). If the pipeline processes more data than these resources can handle, or if there’s a memory leak in the pipeline code, the system might crash, causing the pipeline to fail.

5. Dependency failures


If a pipeline relies on external services or APIs, the unavailability or failure of these services can break the pipeline.

Many pipelines depend on external services or APIs for their data. If these services go down, change unexpectedly, or suffer from their own issues, the pipeline that relies on them can fail. This is a classic problem of cascading failures.

6. Changes in data volume


A sudden increase in data volume can overwhelm the pipeline, leading to performance issues or failures.

A data pipeline designed to handle a specific volume of data may not perform well if there is a sudden increase. This can cause performance issues, delays, or complete failure if the system is overwhelmed and can’t process the incoming data quickly enough.

7. Permission changes


Loss of permissions or credentials needed to access data sources can disrupt the pipeline. If permissions or credentials required to access data sources change or expire, the pipeline will be unable to access the data it needs, causing it to fail. This is often an overlooked aspect but can be critical for pipelines that rely on data from secure or restricted sources.

8. Networking issues


Network issues like latency, dropped packets, or outright failures can disrupt the data flow, leading to partial data delivery or total pipeline failure. This is especially problematic for pipelines that require real-time data streams from remote sources.

9. Versioning issues


Changes to software dependencies, libraries, or the runtime environment can cause compatibility issues. Pipelines often rely on specific versions of libraries, languages, or entire runtime environments. If these are updated or changed without proper testing or adjustment of the pipeline code, compatibility issues can occur, causing the pipeline to break.

10. Human errors


Last but not least, human errors like incorrect configurations, typos, or even the wrong deployment sequence can cause a pipeline to break. This also includes poorly defined requirements, lack of documentation, or inadequate monitoring.

Incorrect configuration settings, poorly defined requirements, or lack of monitoring can also lead to pipeline failures.

Monitoring and testing are crucial for ensuring the reliability of data pipelines. Automated alerts, logging, and regular audits can help in the early identification and resolution of issues that might break the pipeline.

How to fix your broken data pipelines in just 10 steps?

Fixing a broken data pipeline involves a systematic approach to diagnose the issue, implement a fix, and then verify the solution. Here’s a step-by-step guide to tackling the problem:

Step 1: Identify the failure point


  • Monitoring tools: Use real-time monitoring tools to identify where the pipeline failed.
  • Logs analysis: Analyze logs to get clues about the issue. This could involve SQL query logs, system logs, or application-specific logs.

Step 2: Isolate the issue


  • Data isolation: If possible, isolate the portion of the data causing the problem. This is especially useful for debugging without affecting the entire pipeline.
  • Environment isolation: Replicate the issue in a non-production environment to prevent further impact on live data.

Step 3: Diagnose the problem


  • Error messages: Review any error messages for indications of what went wrong.
  • Check dependencies: Verify that all external dependencies like databases, third-party services, and network resources are operational.
  • Code review: Conduct a code review with specific focus around the failure point to identify bugs or logic errors.

Step 4: Identify the root cause


  • Data validation: Check if the data format or schema changed and if that’s causing the issue.
  • Compatibility: Make sure that all components in the pipeline are compatible with each other, particularly if there have been recent updates or changes.

Step 5: Implement the fix


  • Code changes: If the issue is in the code, implement the necessary bug fixes.
  • Configuration changes: If the issue is with the configuration, update it as necessary.
  • Data cleanup: If bad or corrupt data caused the pipeline to break, clean up the data before it enters the pipeline.

Step 6: Test the fix


  • Unit tests: Run unit tests to ensure that the specific issue has been resolved.
  • Integration tests: Run integration tests to ensure that the fix doesn’t break other parts of the pipeline.

Step 7: Deploy the fix


  • Rollback plan: Before deploying the fix, have a rollback plan in case it fails.
  • Incremental deployment: Consider deploying the fix incrementally to monitor its impact.

Step 8: Validate and monitor


  • Validation: Validate the fix by monitoring the pipeline in real-time to ensure that it’s processing data as expected.
  • Performance metrics: Keep an eye on performance metrics to make sure the fix hasn’t negatively impacted the pipeline.

Step 9: Update documentation


  • Root cause and fix: Document what the issue was and how it was resolved.
  • Change management: Record any changes made to the pipeline, including configuration changes and code commits.

Step 10: Retrospective and future-proofing


  • Retrospective: Conduct a meeting to discuss what went wrong and how to prevent similar issues in the future.
  • Monitoring and alerts: If the issue was not caught by existing monitoring and alerts, consider updating them to catch similar issues in the future.

By following these steps, you can not only fix the broken data pipeline but also improve its resilience and reliability for the future.

Also to have an automated data quality control check out → Atlan

What are the pitfalls of the data pipeline?

Data pipelines are crucial in modern data engineering and analytics but come with several pitfalls that teams should be aware of. Here are some of the common challenges:

  1. Complexity and maintenance
  2. Lack of monitoring and alerts
  3. Data quality issues
  4. No version control
  5. No data lineage
  6. Resource inefficiencies
  7. Scalability concerns
  8. Inadequate error handling
  9. Lack of testing
  10. Tight coupling of components
  11. Poor documentation
  12. Security risks

Let us understand each of them in detail:

1. Complexity and maintenance


As data pipelines grow in complexity, they often become harder to manage and maintain. You might start with a simple script that evolves into a spaghetti code of interdependent tasks, making it difficult to understand, troubleshoot, or extend the system.

2. Lack of monitoring and alerts


If proper monitoring and alerting mechanisms aren’t in place, it’s easy to overlook issues until they become critical. In a worst-case scenario, you might not realize your pipeline has been failing until you discover that you’ve lost important data or made decisions based on incorrect analytics.

3. Data quality issues


Bad data, such as duplicates, missing values, and inconsistencies, can propagate through the pipeline, leading to inaccurate analyses and reports. If you’re not vigilant about data quality, it can significantly compromise the reliability of your entire system.

4. No version control


Lack of version control for both code and data can result in inconsistencies and difficulty in rolling back to previous states. This can be particularly troublesome when you have multiple people working on different parts of the pipeline.

5. No data lineage


Without proper data lineage (the tracking of where your data comes from and how it moves through the pipeline), it’s difficult to trace errors back to their source, understand the impact of changes, or assure data governance compliance.

6. Resource inefficiencies


Poorly designed pipelines can consume more resources (CPU, memory, bandwidth) than necessary, leading to increased operational costs. This also reduces the resources available for other tasks and can cause slowdowns or failures.

7. Scalability concerns


If not designed with scalability in mind, data pipelines can become bottlenecks as data volumes grow or as the number of downstream consumers increases. This can require a costly and time-consuming overhaul.

8. Inadequate error handling


Lack of robust error-handling mechanisms can lead to pipeline failures or, worse, silent errors where the pipeline appears to work but generates incorrect data. This can lead to wrong business decisions and a loss of trust in the data system.

9. Lack of testing


Many data pipelines are deployed with inadequate testing, either because of time constraints or a lack of appreciation for the importance of testing in data systems. This increases the risk of bugs and other issues in production.

10. Tight coupling of components


When pipeline components are tightly coupled, a change or failure in one component can have a domino effect, causing other components to fail. Loose coupling, where components interact through well-defined interfaces, can mitigate this risk.

11. Poor documentation


Inadequate documentation makes it difficult for team members to understand the pipeline’s inner workings, which is a significant hindrance to debugging and extending the system. As personnel changes occur, the lack of documentation can become a severe liability.

12. Security risks


Failure to properly secure a data pipeline can expose sensitive data and put the organization at risk. Proper encryption, access controls, and auditing are necessary to mitigate these risks.

Avoiding these pitfalls often involves a combination of good design practices, thorough testing, robust monitoring, and an organizational commitment to data quality and pipeline reliability.

Summarizing it all together

Safeguarding the integrity of your data pipelines is not just a one-off task but an ongoing commitment. Employing these 10 proven strategies—from robust testing and version control to implementing data validation and fail-safe mechanisms—can significantly mitigate the risks associated with data pipeline breakage.

By fostering a culture of continuous monitoring and improvement, you’ll not only prevent costly downtime but also enhance the efficiency and accuracy of your data analytics. Adopt these best practices to build resilient, high-performing data pipelines that will serve as a solid foundation for your data-driven decision-making.

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