Building atomic data pipelines
The final feature of a production data pipeline that we will discuss in this chapter is atomicity. Atomicity means that if a single operation in a transaction fails, then all of the operations fail. If you are inserting 1,000 records into the database, as you did in Chapter 3, Reading and Writing Files, if one record fails, then all 1,000 fail.
In SQL databases, the database will roll back all the changes if record number 500 fails, and it will no longer attempt to continue. You are now free to retry the transaction. Failures can occur for many reasons, some of which are beyond your control. If the power or the network goes down while you are inserting records, do you want those records to be saved to the database? You would then need to determine which records in a transaction succeeded and which failed and then retry only the failed records. This would be much easier than retrying the entire transaction.
In the NiFi data pipelines you have built...
