Azure Data Factory\ Synapse Analytics: Validate File\Folder before using!

In real time, every project would deal with Azure storage or Azure SQL Database. It can be blobs, folders/directories, files. It becomes a crucial step to validate the file\folder\table before actually using them.

Few usecases:

1. Suppose we have to load a file named SalesData.csv from a folder that gets created everyday in the format yyyy/MM/dd. Before we use this file in a copy data activity or a data flow activity, we have to first validate, if the folder exists or not. 
2. If the folder exists, we might want to validate the size of the file. This is important, because, sometimes the files bring no data, i.e. a 0 kb file.
3. Another usecase would be to validate a table structure or file structure and make sure it is compliant with what we expect. 

In ADF\Synapse, we can use Validation activity and\or getmetadata activity to validate files, folders and tables. 

Validation Activity Settings & short description follows:

In the above image, we have a referenced a dataset called DelimitedText2, which would point to either a folder or file in azure blob storage or a table in a Azure SQL DB. Timeout property holds the time afterwhich the activity would timeout (note that, it wont fail). For instance, if the validation activity is meant to validate the presence of a file\folder\table, and it doesn't find the corresponding item, after the timeout time, the activity execution stops and timesout. Next, we have the sleep property which makes the validation activity wait for certain number of seconds before revalidation or timeout. Minimum size property is used to mention the minimum size of a file in bytes (not applicable to table based dataset). 

When the validation activity completes execution or times out, we can access the output json of the validation activity to know about the validation results.

Let us look at the GetMetadata activity and its settings. 

Like validation activity, we have few properties that would help us validate the file\folder\table in a GetMetadata activity in ADF\Synapse. Depending on whether the dataset points to a folder\file\table, the properties (field list) would differ.

The above image depicts the field list corresponding to a folder in ADLS. When we make the dataset point to a file, it would be as below.

So, if the dataset points to a file or table, we see couple of additional properties like Column Count, Size, Structure. 

Having seen about the individual properties\ field list of both the activities, its time to compare and know the similarities and differences. 

The below table compares the capabilities of Validation activity & Get metadata activity.

In a nutshell, ADF\Synapse comes with a variety of activities, sometimes with similar characteristics or capabilities. When it comes to validation, it is based on the use case, we decide to use either Validation activity or Get Metadata activity or both.