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Connectors in Designer

In Designer, a connector is a bridge to an external, third-party service such as Facebook, Google Analytics, or Salesforce. You can use connectors in Designer to develop data pipelines to extract, load, and then transform your data to make it business ready.

To use a connector, you typically need to complete an authentication process and role-based access control to ensure data security. Configuration settings vary depending on the type of connector and the data sources you wish to extract.

Connectors are represented as individual components within Designer's job canvas. When you add a connector to your pipeline, you need to define the extraction logic, such as specifying the tables, files, or API endpoints to retrieve data from. The connector handles the data retrieval process, making it seamless for you.

Data sampling

In Designer, many transformation components and query components offer data sampling. Data sampling lets you inspect a subset of the data produced by a component, helping you ensure that the component is correctly configured before incorporating it into a production pipeline.

To sample data from a component's output, you must first validate the entire pipeline. Refer to the Pipeline canvas documentation for details on pipeline validation.

Once the pipeline is validated, follow these steps to sample data:

  1. Select the component to sample—for example, Table Input.
  2. Click the Sample data tab.
  3. Click Sample data.
  4. The Sample data tab will display a table of data. This table represents the data that the component would generate if you ran (executed) the pipeline. You can review up to a maximum of 1000 rows of sampled data.

Click the refresh button at the top of the Sample data tab to see the row count of the current sample.