Today, on March 15 2019 from 16:34:15 UTC to 16:35:12 UTC there were some orchestration failures in the US region due to an internal system upgrade.

There were not many failures (around 20, so very few are affected), but if you had an orchestration running at that time, please check to make sure that you were unaffected.

We are working on making sure that this will not happen again for any future upgrades.

We were affected by a brief outage of the EU region Snowflake database on Mar 07 between 17:45:00 UTC and 18:25:00 UTC in the EU region. The problem affected extractors and transformations. Please check your orchestrations and re-run them if necessary. Projects in the US region were unaffected. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.

New Features

• Oracle Writer - supports setting custom schema in credentials configuration
• GitHub Extractor - adds organization to downloaded commits and issues
• Storage API - supports multiple where filters and order by statement inside datapreview and asynchronous table export. You can quickly search for your data in datapreview with multiple conditions. We are going to add this feature to UI soon.
• BigQuery Extractor - supports extracting data from the EU region

UI

• full page table preview for Storage tables

Bug fixes

• OAuth Broker API - fixed missing component credentials
• Oracle Extractor - fixed manifest for exported tables if there were more than one table with the same name in different schemas
• Transformations 
• unpaired closing comment tag ( */ ) in SQL query is now properly identified as a user error
  
• added additional retries when creating a workspace

GoodData SSO login using GET links will stop working on March 18. It means that property link in the response of SSO login using GoodData Writer will stop working too. 

If you use any custom solution built upon our Writer, you need to migrate it to the new POST login, i.e. take property encryptedClaims from our resource and call this GoodData API call: https://help.gooddata.com/display/doc/API+Reference#/reference/authentication/sso-pgp-login which will login your user. SSO links to GoodData in our Connection UI are already migrated to the new method.

We're happy to announce a small technology update of our Storage Console. Several months in the making, this will allow us to bring new features in the near future.

Even though the primary purpose of this update is to bring the code up to date and align the design with the rest of the UI, we have already made some small improvements:

• You can no longer see an additional loading page when navigating to Storage from other pages.
• Search in buckets (or tables) highlights the matched parts of your search query in yellow.

• An active bucket is highlighted on the left side when its detail or a detail of its table is active.

• Files and Jobs sections are automatically reloaded every 20 seconds.
• Event sections have predefined searches, so you can filter events faster.

• Buttons Create Bucket, Link Bucket and Reload are now bigger.

• There's an option to create Table Alias directly from a table detail (in Actions).

• Other minor cosmetic things like navigation, buttons, etc.

UPDATE 2019-02-25 9:00 AM UTC
A fix has beed deployed and the problem now longer occurs. We suppose, that around 50 jobs suffered from this issue.
We do sincerely apologize for the trouble this may have caused to you. Don't hesitate to contact our support for help.

2019-02-24 10:00 PM UTC
We're experiencing issues with new OAuth Broker API. 

In some cases it might not return the authorised credentials for a component's job. Re-running the job might be successful.

The fix will be deployed very soon.

If you haven't migrated to the new version, please wait until the fix is deployed.

We're terribly sorry for any inconvenience.

We have just released a new version of our OAuth Broker API.

OAuth Broker is a KBC service, which handles the authorisation flow for all KBC components (extractors, writers, ...) using OAuth authorisation and also stores the credentials (tokens) for them.

The new version was needed to simplify integration with KBC and allows us to implement new features into this API more easily.
The features we are preparing are for example automatic refreshing of OAuth tokens if needed, using more than one OAuth client id for better quota limits handling and so on.

The old OAuth Broker is now deprecated, and we ask you to migrate affected configurations credentials before May 1, 2019. We can't migrate these credentials automatically because we cannot modify configurations in your project without your consent.

In the project Overview, you can see whether your project contains any configurations needing migration:

We need to apply an important OS-level security update to R/Python sandboxes environment. Because of that, the existing sandboxes cannot be extended. This means the following:

• R/Python sandboxes created prior 2019/02/12 will be terminated no later than 2019/02/17 14:00 UTC even if you try to extend them.
• If you wish to keep the contents of sandbox created prior 2019/02/12 14:00 UTC, please save them manually and recreate the sandbox
• R/Python sandboxes created after 2019/02/12 14:00 UTC are unaffected
• SQL sandboxes are unaffected

Component Updates

• Python Transformations - now uses the same Python version 3.7.2 as in the transformation sandbox.
• R transformations have a new backend (v 3.5.2), and we added docs about how to do opt-in in the new version.
• Storage Writer - now supports the `recreate` mode that will drop and create the target table.
• Processor Decompress - supports graceful decompression, will skip the file that failed to decompress.
• Mysql/Mssql/ extractors - allow any numeric or datetime type for incremental fetching.
• PostgreSQL -  has automatic increment fetching. UI has to be migrated to the new version (by the green button in the config overview).
• Generic Extractor now supports usage of deeply nested functions.
• Zendesk Extractor - fixed extracting of custom ticket values fields, existing configurations need to be resaved (switch to template->scroll to the bottom-> select a template again and save).
• New component for Mailgun (sending emails).

UI Updates

• Generic Snowflake sandbox - now uses CLONE TABLE load type. It's way faster and it only loads complete tables (no rows sampling).

  

• You can choose a backend version of R/Python transformations.

  

• Snowflake writer - adding a new table now autoloads column datatypes if present (usual for tables originated from db extractors).
• Transformations Output  - shows warning when there are 2 output mappings with the same destination table within one phase.

  

• PostgreSQL Extractor - query editor now supports PostreSQL specific syntax.

Storage and Project Management Updates

• All newly created tables in Storage have 16MB cell size instead of 1MB.
• Limit 110 columns in data preview were removed, contents of wider tables are displayed normally.
• Organization invitations are now working similarly to project invitations - an invited user has to accept the invitation.

We're working hard every day to make Keboola Connection faster and minimize the time you spend waiting for your results. This effort includes a wide variety of components of the platform architecture. Some of the changes are straightforward and transparent to the end users, but others are unexpectedly complicated. 

This is the case of transformations. We rolled out an update earlier this year and were forced to immediately rollback to the previous version as it broke the data flow in a few projects. This time, we're more prepared. We have identified the source of the incompatibility, and we'll be rolling out the update silently, only for those projects that will not be adversely affected. The projects that would be affected will not be updated. Instead, they will be notified to take steps to fix the incompatibilities. Then they'll become eligible for the update as well. 

Parallel output processing

In the original system, when all transformations in a phase are executed, the output processing starts. It takes all the transformations sequentially and processes the outputs one by one. The order of the executions is not defined, but it is predictable and, most importantly, it doesn't change between runs. Some projects rely on a specific order of output processing to achieve certain goals.

To speed up the output, we have decided to queue all outputs at once and let Storage handle all jobs as fast as possible. But, as you already may have noticed, this mean the transformations can run in any order or even in parallel. This may affect the result of the output if you relied on a particular order.

Updating the project

The project overview and all affected transformations will notify you about multiple outputs being written to the same table in Storage. You will be easily navigated to the places that need to be fixed. Please contact our support if you need any help doing that. 

Once you have fixed all instances where multiple outputs are written to the same table in your project, you can immediately contact us using the support button. We will turn on the update in your project. Or, wait until we update your project automatically (we're watching all projects regularly).

[2019-01-22 1:21 UTC]

Snowflake just announced that disabling OCSP check is able circumvent the error. KBC is fully working, you shouldn't have any issue for now!

[2019-01-22 00:51 UTC]

We were removing all OCSP validation and KBC platform is working OK in both (US/EU) regions for now. 

At this time, we have no more updates from Snowflake support team yet. You shouldn't have any issue with Keboola Connection. In case of any hiccups, please open ticket directly from your KBC project. Once we have RCA report from Snowflake, this post will be updated.

We're very sorry for this inconvenience and thank you so much for your patience with us and Snowflake engineers.

[2019-01-22 00:34 UTC]

SQL Sandboxes are fully working. Take care that all existing credentials were discarded - use new combination of username and password.

[2019-01-22 00:16 UTC]

Just a few components are still having an issue. 

To make up for this outage we're going to add additional resources and run your jobs in Keboola Connection for next few hours on Warp Drive.

[2019-01-22 00:08 UTC]

Almost everything is working now. Last issues are in Transformation Sandboxes.

[2019-01-22 00:02 UTC]

We're very close to fully working platform. Bear with us! 

[2019-01-21 23:50 UTC]

Component jobs are still serving errors from Snowflake DWH. We're disabling OCSP checks on other places in our infrastructure.

[2019-01-21 23:37 UTC]

Snowflake just confirmed its SSL validation issue in their ODBC driver (https://community.snowflake.com/s/group/0F90Z000000U8d9/alerts-awsus-west).

[2019-01-21 23:35 UTC]

US region is working.

[2019-01-21 23:34 UTC]

EU region is working.

[2019-01-21 23:32 UTC]

We're building app version with temporarily modified OSCP checks.

[2019-01-21 23:17 UTC]

This issue seem to be connected with OCSP cert validation on Snowflake side. We're still working on it.

[2019-01-21 22:50 UTC]

Starting 2019-01-21 22:33 UTC, all customers are seeing error messages throughout their account. We’re aware of the issue and are working on it urgently.

We’re really sorry to be holding you up today! Please know our engineering and operations teams are working hard to get everything up and running and we will update you right here in 30 minutes with the latest information.

In December 2018 we had two incidents (2018-12-14 and 2018-12-19) which resulted in a number of failed jobs. The first one caused 0.8% of jobs to fail (in a 24h window) and the second one caused 1.2% of jobs to fail (in a 24h window). 

Both incidents were caused by unavailability of the Docker container registry (Amazon ECR). In the first incident we were receiving exceeded quota errors and we initially thought that these were related to higher infrastructure load. A thorough investigation showed that we were nowhere near the limits and now we finally got a confirmation from Amazon that this was an error on their side. The second incident was caused by complete unavailability of the ECR for approximately 30 minutes.

Technical background:

The Docker container registry is used to store the executable code for each component running in Keboola Connection. It is accessed on every job run to make sure that a job is run with the most recent version of the component code. During 2017 we moved most of our components to the Amazon ECR which proved to be very reliable. The outage mentioned above is the first one since 2016 when we began using it. 

Most of the Keboola's infrastructure is duplicated with automatic fail-safe mechanisms in place. That means that minor outages in the underlying services are not noticeable by the end-users. Duplicating the Docker container registry, however, is not an easy task because Docker is not really ready for that yet. So this remains a single point of failure.

Measures already taken and yet to be taken:

• We have immediately implemented a retry mechanism in our code which will handle short outages, the retry mechanism will also be further improved.

• We have already started (prior to the incident) reworking the component code validation tooling so that the number of queries to the ECR is reduced by several orders. This will help reduce the impact, should a similar incident happen again.

• We'll use a dedicated ECR for each Keboola Connection region which will reduce the affected scope for any similar incident in the future. 

Between 2019-01-15 15:58 and 2019-01-16 8:25 UTC we had a bug in our platform which caused some jobs to fail with user error "Some columns are missing in the csv file". The bug affected jobs where data was imported to Storage with non-default delimiter (default is colon). It is also possible that in some cases an extra column was created in the table. The column contains no data. This column needs to be deleted manually otherwise any subsequent jobs will fail.

We do sincerely apologize for the trouble this may have caused to you. Don't hesitate to contact our support for help.

Some Snowflake transformations fail with such error: odbc_exec(): SQL error: [unixODBC]SQL execution internal error: Processing aborted due to error 300010:1087106694; incident 5370475., SQL state XX000 in SQLExecDirect. It seems that there is some issue in the Snowflake warehouse. We will keep you informed.

Update 19:30 UTC: The problem should be fixed in the US region. (Last occurrence in our infrastructure is from 12:08 UTC.) It seems there was an issue specific to some CREATE TABLE AS SELECT and INSERTs that use window functions.

Components

Google Drive Writer (wr-google-drive)

• We announced the new version of Google Drive Writer on June 28th, 2017.
• This is the last call, the old component will be shut down by the end of this month - January 31st, 2019.

Lucky Guess (rt-lucky-guess)

• Enhanced Analysis for Redshift backend is no longer available.
• This component will be shut down on January 31st, 2019.

SalesForce Extractor (ex-salesforce)

• This component is already deprecated.
• This component will be shutdown on January 31st, 2019.

YouTube Extractor (ex-youtube)

• This component is already deprecated and no jobs were run in last months.
• This component will be shut down immediately.

Zendesk Extractor (ex-zendesk)

• A new version of the Zendesk extractor was announced on July 27, 2016.
• Like the YouTube Extractor, no jobs were run in last months and we will shut it down immediately.

Restbox (restbox)

• This component was deprecated on July 16, 2018 with multiple replacements.
• Same here, no jobs were run in last months and it will be shut down immediately.

MySQL Transformations

MySQL Transformations were deprecated on November 13, 2017. As we promised, MySQL Transformations were supported in 2018 and will be finally shut down on January 31st, 2019.

Deprecated Bucket and Table attributes

We are deprecating Bucket and Table attributes. These attributes were used as configuration storage for legacy components. If you need to store additional information with buckets or tables, please use the Metadata API.

Direct single sign-on access to GoodData projects from Keboola Connection has been improved and its security enhanced. Due to it, access has been disabled to all existing users and you have to enable it again in Writer's configuration. 

Also, you are no longer able to switch between projects, once you are in GoodData. You have to return back to Connection and access the other project from there. Although it can be a little less comfortable, it brings improved security and we believe it is a better solution for you.

Between 1:00 - 8:20 CET January 4th, 2019 some Facebook extractor jobs failed after yesterday update of the extractor. We rolled back to the previous working version and continue investigating the issue. Please revise your facebook ads extractor latest jobs and restart if needed. 

We are sorry for this inconvenience.

Update 12:50 CET

The issue has been resolved. The problem was in configurations that used own its authorization token, i.e., not authorized under Keboola Facebook App.

New components and component updates

• New FTP extractor is now in beta. It is packed with the same features as AWS S3 extractor and it is extensible with processors. We aim to gradually replace the current FTP extractor which is developed by 3rd party.
• New fit-into-storage processor that allows to import non-csv files (TXT, JSON) into storage by wrapping them into CSV tables.
  
• AWS S3 Extractor fixes bug with file matching. When the Subfolders option was off and Wildcard option was on, the extractor would erroneously download files contained in subfolders exactly matching the key.
• MongoDB extractor export mode is now set to "raw" by default on new configurations.

Enhancements

Input and output mapping for components is now parallelized. Configurations with large number of tables in input and output mapping (except transformations) should now run considerably faster. This affects both extractors and writers. Most recently updated extractors (e.g. AWS S3, FTP, HTTP, MySQL, MSSQL, Storage) also load tables into storage during the extraction of other tables. Together, these make up to 40% run time reduction for some configurations.

Input mapping load type is now shown in input mapping details:

The Run Orchestration dialog now has the option to select/deselect all tasks:

Developers

The option to have gzipped CSV file on component output mapping (/data/out/tables/) was removed. Only plain CSV files are accepted now. To our best knowledge this was never used.

We have just released a new version of AdWords Extractor. It works with AdWords API v201809 (see the Release notes).

The previous version of the extractor is deprecated and you can use our migration tool which will migrate your AWQL queries. As usual, you have to reauthorize the extractor and give it access to your AdWords data again. The previous version uses AdWords API v201802 which will be switched off on 30 January 2019.

Since 2018-12-19, 19:13:00 UTC we're experiencing a higher rate of application errors in all regions due to an outage in AWS ECR. 

We're investigating the issue and update this post once there.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update 19:30 UTC

This outage also affects the Developer Portal.

Update 20:05 UTC

As of 19:51 UTC the issue is resolved by Amazon

Between 23:16 - 23:22 UTC December 14th, 2018 some jobs failed with Application error due to spikes in infrastructure load. 

We are investigating the root cause and taking measures so that this does not repeat. 

We deeply apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Update [Dec 15, 2018, 08:19 CET]: This still happens occasionally.

Update [Dec 15, 2018, 10:57 CET]: We're still working on mitigating the issue. Comparing to historical hourly avg, actual job error rate is 6% bigger.

Update [Dec 15, 2018, 11:47 CET]: We're going to deploy patch into production. It will take about 2 hours. Expected resolution: 14:00 CET

Update [Dec 15, 2018, 12:45 CET]: Patch has been deployed.

There was an outage of the Keboola Connection platform in the US region from Dec 13, 2018, 23:19 CET to Dec 14, 2018, 02:28 CET. It was caused by an update of the Elasticsearch Service.

It was a self-service update of the managed Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and we decided to do it because updates were tested and all other clusters we're using were updated successfully - without any issues.

Updates like this usually go smoothly, but not this time. Unfortunately, the cluster froze and refused to accept any requests.

After detecting this, we decided to start a new service and restore from backup.

All services were fully restored to their normal state by Dec 14, 2018, at 02:28 CET.

We have already taken action to prevent this kind of failure from happening again, and we'll be testing all future updates on testing clusters (using snapshots from production clusters).

Any orchestrations in the US region that were scheduled to start during the outage were not started. Therefore you will need to run them manually or wait until their next scheduled run.

We want to sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by this outage.

New Features

Partial Label

Transformation description, Last Runs, and Updates

• There's a new option to save transformation with description.
  

• The Last Runs section and Updates section have been added also to the Transformation Detail page and all components which support "single runs" (e.g. when HTTP extractor or AWS S3 extractor is extracting one file)

Input Mapping data types

In transformations with Snowflake backend, data types should be populated automatically for tables created with the components which set data types - MySQL extractor, Oracle extractor, MSSQL Server extractor, PostgreSQL extractor, DB2 extractor, and Snowflake extractor.

Input Mapping load type

For Snowflake backend, you can set Clone Table load type which leads to an ultra-fast load to a workspace. Most of your tables should be loaded under 10 seconds.

You can find more about this feature in our documentation.

Enhancements

• You can see a component type in Orchestration Tasks, thus having both MySQL writer and MySQL extractor in task won't be confusing anymore
• API Token can be Refreshed, Sent or Deleted directly from the token detail page

• We improved how data is loaded to Storage from our components - compression is used by default. Loads to Storage are about 40% faster for sliced files. So it impacts Credit Consumption too.
• MSSQL Server Extractor has new option WITH(NOLOCK) and supports incremental fetching with smalldatetime column
• Orchestration Notifications page has been improved, and notifications can be set easier

New components and component updates

• In RStudio/Jupyter sandboxes there's a hard memory limit set to 8GB. This limit is equal to memory limit in Transformations. With this change, you can be sure that what worked in Sandbox will work in Transformation too.
• Rename Files processor to rename files using regular expressions: https://components.keboola.com/components/jakub-bartel.processor-rename-files
• XLS processor to convert .xls(x) files to .csv files: https://components.keboola.com/components/jakub-bartel.processor-xls2csv
• Snowflake writer uses atomic swap of tables during full load (prevents empty table issue)

From around 21:10 CET today, Snowflake began having availability issues in the EU region.

https://community.snowflake.com/s/group/0F90Z000000U8dJ/alerts-awseu-frankfurt

[Update 21:33 CET -- They have discovered the cause and are working on a remedy] 

[Update 21:42 CET -- Service is now fully restored in the EU region]

The orchestration section is one of the last parts of Keboola Connection which does not yet have a unified user interface. We believe that users should feel comfortable using the different parts of our UI, so unifying the interface elements is very important to us.

We have launched the new Orchestration Detail page

What has changed?

• There is no longer a sidebar on the left side with a list of orchestrations
• Tasks, Schedule and Notifications now have their own place in the detail page - they're no longer combined in that table
• We added new sidebar on the right side that you should feel familiar with because it is the same as other components
• Orchestration Action buttons (Run, Enable/Disable and Delete) have been moved to the right sidebar
• Also, information about creation date and updates now also have their own place in the right sidebar

This is the beginning of the Orchestration Interface tuning and there are more things to come.

---

Just for completeness, this is the previous version:

During deployment of Keboola Connection in the EU region at around 13:30 CET today there was a timing issue that resulted in some failed storage jobs.

The problem occurred because of the asynchronous timing between the rollover of a worker and the API server.  A small number of jobs that were created with the previous version then failed when executed against the new API.  These jobs failed with one of the following error messages "`Invalid source type" or "Workspace not found".

There was no corruption of data by these failures as no jobs that were in progress were affected.

 

We're sorry for this inconvenience.

New Features

Updated Components

SQL Server Extractor now supports incremental fetching on DateTime and Identity columns

Unexpected Events

Many of you have noticed that we added validation of SQL queries to the Transformation Detail page last week.

Due to some problems in availability of this feature we decided to revert this change.

For now you can still use the "standard" validation button on the right.

We love this feature too and the plan is to bring it back after an additional round of improvements.

Today between 10 and 11 a.m. (UTC) SQL validations and SQLdep functionality in Transformations were returning errors.

The errors were caused by temporary outage of external SQLdep service (https://status.sqldep.com/779807590). Transformation jobs were not affected.