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ETL Best Practices

Pipeline Design​

  • Single responsibility — Each pipeline should have a clear, focused purpose
  • Idempotency — Design pipelines to be safely re-runnable
  • Incremental by default — Use incremental loading whenever possible
  • Schema validation — Validate data quality at each step

Error Handling​

  • Dead letter queues — Capture failed records for investigation
  • Alerting — Set up alerts for failures and anomalies
  • Retry with backoff — Use exponential backoff for transient failures

Performance​

  • Partitioning — Partition large tables by date or high-cardinality keys
  • Compression — Use Parquet or Avro for intermediate storage
  • Resource right-sizing — Match compute resources to workload

Security​

  • Secrets management — Never hardcode credentials; use vault integration
  • Least privilege — Grant minimal required permissions
  • Audit logging — Enable for compliance and debugging

See Also​