How to use concurrency in Azure Synapse pipelines?

by Jan 12, 2022

How to prevent concurrent pipeline execution?

Concurrency

This week I had a discussion with a colleague about how we can now make sure that a Pipeline does not start when it’s already started.

He then indicated, have you ever thought of the concurrency option?  I’ve seen this option before but never paid attention to it.

How does the concurrency work?

If you read the Microsoft documentation it says the following:
The maximum number of concurrent runs the pipeline can have. By default, there is no maximum. If the concurrency limit is reached, additional pipeline runs are queued until earlier ones complete.

The concurrency option is working in Azure Synapse Analytics and in Azure Data Factory.

I started to test this functionality and there are certainly some nice use cases for that:

  • If the Pipeline was started via a Schedule and someone else triggers this Pipeline Manually, the Pipeline is placed in a queue.
  • Sometimes it happens that there is a delay in the processing of data or that more data is delivered. If you process this data every 30 minutes and the 1st run is not yet ready and the 2nd starts again, this could result in incorrect data. Also in this case the to be executed run is placed in a queue and only starts when the previous one is ready.

It is a fairly simple process but can be quite useful especially in the case of short loading windows.

Azure-Synapse-Concurrency

Please pay attention, running the pipeline in a Debug modus has no effect on this and will run directly.
Check the monitoring regularly to check if this situation is not happening all the time, if so,  you better change the recurrency of your Triggered Pipeline. You still have the option to cancelled a queued pipeline.

How to enable concurrency?

On the Pipeline you want to enable the concurrency, go to the settings tab and set Concurrency to 1, if you leave it blank the pipeline will not be queued. There’s no maximum.

Enable-concurrency-Azure-Synapse

When you have any questions regarding concurrency, please let me know.

Feel free to leave a comment

2 Comments

  1. Santosh
    Santosh on September 14, 2022 at 4:19 pm

    Thanks.
    Quick question:
    What happens if I have scheduled my pipeline to run every hour and the current run is taking longer than an hour and currently running?
    Does the second run gets queued state?
    Since its schedule based, the second run also gets running , performing the activities in it?

    Reply
    • Erwin
      Erwin on September 14, 2022 at 5:17 pm

      Hi Santosh,

      If you have a hourly schedule, all scheduled pipelines will be queued, like you can see in the picture. With this option no scheduled runs are mixed up.
      When you have a lot of queueing pipelines you should consider to change the trigger time. Hopefully this will solve your question.

      Erwin

      Reply

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