Peek Stage

The Peek stage is a Development / Debugging stage in IBM Data Stage used to view (peek at) data flowing through a job during runtime. It helps developers verify data, troubleshoot issues, and validate transformations without writing data to a file or table.


What does Peek stage do?

  • Displays actual data rows passing through a link
  • Shows data in the job log
  • Helps in debugging and testing
  • Can be enabled or disabled easily

Key characteristics

🔹 Passive stage (does not change data)

🔹 Does not affect row count

🔹 Used only during development

🔹 Should be removed or disabled in production


Where is the output shown?

  • Data appears in the Director → Job Log
  • Output is shown as formatted rows under Peek stage messages

Example log output:

Peek_1, link output: Row 1: Eno=101, Ename=John, Salary=50000

Peek_1, link output: Row 2: Eno=102, Ename=Mary, Salary=60000


Common use cases

1️.Validate source data

    Check whether source file or table data is read correctly.

2️.Debug transformation logic

Confirm output after:

  • Transformer
  • Aggregator
  • Lookup
  • Filter

3️.Identify data issues

  • NULL values
  • Incorrect calculations
  • Unexpected records

Important configuration options

  • Rows to display – Limit number of rows printed to log
  • Column selection – Choose specific columns to display
  • Enable/Disable – Can be turned off without deleting

Example job flow

Source

  |

Transformer

  |

Peek

  |

Target


Peek vs other debugging options

Stage

Purpose

Peek

View data in job log

Sequential File

Write data to file

Dataset

Store data for reuse

Row Generator

Generate test data


Why should Peek stage not be used in production?
   Because it writes data to job logs, increases log size, affects performance, and may expose sensitive data.


 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Most Recent posts

Head Stage

  The Head stage in IBM Data Stage is a Processing (active) stage used to limit the number of rows passed to the next stage. It is mainly us...