Improvements in GoodData Writer

There are some under the hood improvements to GoodData Writer which allow you to rename datasets already exported to GoodData and freely rename attributes and facts (to this moment GoodData Writer has been automatically adding name of dataset to attribute/fact title). 

Also there is possibility to change default GoodData identifiers for datasets and their columns. This is suitable especially for projects migrated from CloudConnect, otherwise you won't need this feature probably.

This improvement is available immediately for new writers but existing ones will be migrated in several waves during upcoming days.

Facebook Ads Extractor API Update 2.4 [30.9.2015]

The current API version (2.3) our Facebook Ads Extractor uses will be deprecated on 7.10.2015. 

We will update the extractor to current 2.4 version. Please review the changelog and see if it affects your counfiguration: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/changelog

If your extractor fails, or delivers wrong data after 30.9., please let us know and we'll investigate what caused the problem.

Amazon AWS - massive error rate in cloud API

Amazon Web Services - our major backend cloud provider - announcing massive API error rate in their infrastructure

More details and updates can be found at their official status page http://status.aws.amazon.com/. AWS Status page archive is also here.

Thanks to our heavy dependency on Amazon AWS cloud, our Keboola Connection platform suffer by their errors, so please be patient, check AWS status page and keep your fingers crossed! 

For more information, do not hesitate to contact us here in comments or by support@keboola.com.

UPDATE (2015-09-20 7pm CEST): Amazon API is back in business. 

Media coverage - VentureBeat

Redshift query limits

We have introduced query limits for Redshift clusters to prevent deadlocks and keep the clusters in good shape:

  • 5 queries in parallel (further queries will be waiting in a queue for 60 minutes)
  • 60 minutes execution time per query

If the query time exceeds 60 minutes, it will be terminated with a user error "Query cancelled on user's request" and/or "An exception occurred while executing".

These limits will take place during the next maintenance window of each cluster (after it reboots). 

If you need to change the limits, contact us at support@keboola.com.

EDIT September 22nd: Due to a high number of requests for a higher number of concurrent queries we've increased the limit from 2 to 5 concurrent queries on each cluster.


Blocking SELECT queries in transformations

A new version of Transformation API was released today with a new feature - we're blocking all SELECT queries. 

These queries do not perform any real operation to your data (if not accompanied with CREATE TABLE or CREATE VIEW) and caused our servers to load the result in memory. If your transformation contains a pure SELECT query, it will fail with a Query not valid error message. 

The fix is easy - delete or comment the SELECT query, it won't effect your transformation.

Thanks for your understanding. 

Retrying Orchestration Jobs and Warning Notifications

We've heard your cries about how difficult it was to re-run failed jobs in the Orchestrator, so we did something about it:

You can now retry any failed job in your orchestration's job queue. On the (failed) job's detail page you'll see a "Job Retry" button in the upper right corner:

Just click on it and press "run" to re-run failed tasks:

If you need to run just a few tasks (failed or not), click on "Choose orchestration tasks to run" to show the task selection list. Select the ones you want by click on grey button in the middle of the window and middle area and activate/de-activate desired tasks.

The run button will create new tasks, so everything will run in the original environment, under the same circumstances and with the same job parameters.  Just take care to note that it is possible that the data underlying the configuration may have been modified by a different process (ie: someone else working with it) in between the last time the job was run and your re-run.

Notifications

If some tasks are prone to fail often (i.e. wrong credentials in client's Google Analytics), you'll want to activate the "Continue on Failure" flag for the "unstable" tasks. If activated, the Orchestrator will not send an error notification when that specific task fails. Instead the Orchestrator will send out a message to our new notifications channel for "Warnings". Go ahead and subscribe to receive emails about all Warnings:

New MySQL server for DB Writer

We have launched a new MySQL server for DB Writer. All current credentials (both for reading and writing) are now obsolete, if you have any applications connecting to the MySQL database provided by DB Writer please update the credentials from the writer's page. 

Manual File Uploads Fixed

We've made some changes to the file uploads.

Previously, manual file uploads were behaving a little unreliably.  Occasionally, the file appeared to have been uploaded, but in reality it had not been.  This has now  been fixed, so when you see a file listed, you can be sure that it is really there.

Also, all uploaded files are now immediately encrypted for storage.