Global Identifier

Learn about the concept of a global identifier.

Definition #

Pachyderm provides users with a simple way to follow a change throughout their DAG (i.e., traverse Provenance and Subvenance).

Pachyderm associates a commit ID to each new commit. You can quickly check this new commit by running pachctl list commit repo@branch. All resulting downstream commits and jobs in your DAG will then share that same ID (Global Identifier).

📖

The commits and jobs sharing the same ID represent a logically-related set of objects. The ID of a commit is also:

the ID of any commits created along due to provenance relationships,
and the ID of any jobs triggered by the creation of those commits.

This ability to track down related commits and jobs with one global identifier brought the need to introduce a new scope to our original concepts of job and commit. The nuance in the scope of a commit or a job ( “Global” or “Local”) gives the term two possible meanings.

CONCEPT	SCOPE	DEFINITION
Commit	Global	A commit with `global` scope (global commit) represents the set of all provenance-dependent commits sharing the same ID. You can retrieve a global commit by running `pachctl list commit <commitID>`.
Commit	Local Repo	The same term of `commit`, applied to the more focused scope of a repo (`pachctl list commit <repo>@<commitID>` or `pachctl list commit <repo>@<branch>=<commitID>`), represents “the Git-like” record of one commit in a single branch of a repository’s file system.
Job	Global	A job with `global` scope (global job) is the set of jobs triggered due to commits in a global commit. You can retrieve a global job by running `pachctl list job <commitID>`.
Job	Local Pipeline	Narrowing down the scope to a single pipeline (`pachctl list job <pipeline>@<commitID>`) shifts the meaning to the execution of a given job in a pipeline of your DAG.

List All Global Commits And Global Jobs #

You can list all global commits by running the following command:

pachctl list commit

Each global commit displays how many (sub) commits it is made of.

ID                               SUBCOMMITS PROGRESS CREATED        MODIFIED
1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca 7          ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 7 seconds ago  7 seconds ago
28363be08a8f4786b6dd0d3b142edd56 6          ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 24 seconds ago 24 seconds ago
e050771b5c6f4082aed48a059e1ac203 4          ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 24 seconds ago 24 seconds ago

Similarly, if you run the equivalent command for global jobs:

pachctl list job

you will notice that the job IDs are shared with the global commit IDs.

ID                               SUBJOBS PROGRESS CREATED            MODIFIED
1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca 2       ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 55 seconds ago     55 seconds ago
28363be08a8f4786b6dd0d3b142edd56 1       ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ About a minute ago About a minute ago
e050771b5c6f4082aed48a059e1ac203 1       ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ About a minute ago About a minute ago

For example, in this example, 7 commits and 2 jobs are involved in the changes occured in the global commit ID 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca.

ℹ️

The progress bar is equally divided to the number of steps, or pipelines, you have in your DAG. In the example above,1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca is two steps. If one of the sub-jobs fails, you will see the progress bar turn red for that pipeline step. To troubleshoot, look into that particular pipeline execution.

List All Commits And Jobs With A Global ID #

To list all (sub) commits involved in a global commit:

pachctl list commit 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca

REPO         BRANCH COMMIT                           FINISHED      SIZE        ORIGIN DESCRIPTION
images       master 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca 5 minutes ago 238.3KiB    USER
edges.spec   master 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca 5 minutes ago 244B        ALIAS
montage.spec master 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca 5 minutes ago 405B        ALIAS
montage.meta master 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca 4 minutes ago 1.656MiB    AUTO
edges        master 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca 5 minutes ago 133.6KiB    AUTO
edges.meta   master 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca 5 minutes ago 373.9KiB    AUTO
montage      master 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca 4 minutes ago 1.292MiB    AUTO

Similarly, change commit in job to list all (sub) jobs linked to your global job ID.

pachctl list job 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca

ID                               PIPELINE STARTED       DURATION  RESTART PROGRESS  DL       UL       STATE
1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca montage  5 minutes ago 4 seconds 0       1 + 0 / 1 79.49KiB 381.1KiB success
1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca edges    5 minutes ago 2 seconds 0       1 + 0 / 1 57.27KiB 22.22KiB success

For each pipeline execution (sub job) within this global job, Pachyderm shows the time since each sub job started and its duration, the number of datums in the PROGRESS section, and other information. The format of the progress column is DATUMS PROCESSED + DATUMS SKIPPED / TOTAL DATUMS.

For more information, see Datum Processing States.

ℹ️

The global commit and global job above are the result of a pachctl put file images@master -i images.txt in the images repo of the open cv example.

The following diagram illustrates the global commit and its various components:

global_commit_after_putfile

Let’s take a look at the origin of each commit.

ℹ️

Check the list of all commit origins in the Commit page.

Inspect the commit ID 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca in the images repo, the repo in which our change (put file) has originated:
```
pachctl inspect commit images@1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca --raw
```
Note that this original commit is of USER origin (i.e., the result of a user change).
```
"origin": {
"kind": "USER"
    },
```

Inspect the following commit 1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca produced in the output repos of the edges pipeline:

pachctl inspect commit edges@1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca --raw

{
    "commit": {
        "branch": {
        "repo": {
            "name": "edges",
            "type": "user"
        },
        "name": "master"
        },
        "id": "1035715e796f45caae7a1d3ffd1f93ca"
    },
    "origin": {
        "kind": "AUTO"
    },
    "parent_commit": {
        "branch": {
        "repo": {
            "name": "edges",
            "type": "user"
        },
        "name": "master"
        },
        "id": "28363be08a8f4786b6dd0d3b142edd56"
    },
    "started": "2021-07-07T13:52:34.140584032Z",
    "finished": "2021-07-07T13:52:36.507625440Z",
    "direct_provenance": [
        {
        "repo": {
            "name": "edges",
            "type": "spec"
        },
        "name": "master"
        },
        {
        "repo": {
            "name": "images",
            "type": "user"
        },
        "name": "master"
        }
    ],
    "details": {
        "size_bytes": "22754"
    }
}

Note that the origin of the commit is of kind AUTO as it has been trigerred by the arrival of a commit in the upstream repo images.

    "origin": {
        "kind": "AUTO"
    },

The same origin (AUTO ) applies to the commits sharing that same ID in the montage output repo as well as edges.meta and montage.meta system repos.

📖

Check the list of all types of repos in the Repo page.

Besides the USER and AUTO commits, notice a set of ALIAS commits in edges.spec and montage.spec:

pachctl inspect commit edges.spec@336f02bdbbbb446e91ba27d2d2b516c6 --raw

The version of each pipeline within their respective .spec repos are neither the result of a user change, nor of an automatic change. They have, however, contributed to the creation of the previous AUTO commits. To make sure that we have a complete view of all the data and pipeline versions involved in all the commits resulting from the initial put file, their version is kept as ALIAS commits under the same global ID.

For a full view of GlobalID in action, take a look at our GlobalID illustration.

Track Provenance Downstream #

Pachyderm provides the wait commit <commitID> command that enables you to track your commits downstream as they are produced.

Unlike the list commit <commitID>, each line is printed as soon as a new (sub) commit of your global commit finishes.

Change commit in job to list the jobs related to your global job as they finish processing a commit.

Squash And Delete Commit #

See squash commit and delete commit in the Delete a Commit / Delete Data page of the How-Tos section of this Documentation.

👈 Distributed Computing