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ID Collator

ID Stitching is one of the most important features of Profiles. Being able to perform ID stitching to determine the accounts belonging to the same customer/user is very important to get a 360-degree view of that user.

However many a times, we may not require ID stitching for a particular entity, especially if there are no edges in the ID graph of an entity. To build a feature view on such an entity, you will still need to perform ID stitching. Although this approach is not wrong, it is computationally redundant.

Profiles provides the ID Collator is to get all IDs of that particular entity from various input tables and create one collated list of IDs.

Sample project

Let’s take a case where we have defined two entities in our project - one is user and the other is session.

If user entity has multiple IDs defined, there are basically edges which make the use of an ID stitcher logical. On the other hand, session may have only one ID, ssn_id, there won’t be any possibility of edges. In such a case, all we need is a complete list of ssn_id.

Here is the corresponding inputs and entities definition.

entities:
  - name: user
    id_column_name: user_rud_id
    id_types:
      - user_id
      - anonymous_id
  - name: session
    id_column_name: session_id
    id_types:
      - ssn_id

Project file:

inputs:
  - name: user_accounts
    table: tbl_user_accounts
    occurred_at_col: insert_ts
    ids:
      - select: "user_id"
        type: user_id
        entity: user
  - name: sign_in
    table: tbl_sign_in
    occurred_at_col: insert_ts
    ids:
      - select: "user_id"
        type: user_id
        entity: user
      - select: "ssn_id"
        type: ssn_id
        entity: session
      - select: "anonymous_id"
        type: anonymous_id
        entity: user
  - name: sign_up
    table: tbl_sign_up
    occurred_at_col: insert_ts
    ids:
      - select: "user_id"
        type: user_id
        entity: user
      - select: "ssn_id"
        type: ssn_id
        entity: session
      - select: "anonymous_id"
        type: anonymous_id
        entity: user

Here, the entity: session has only one ID type. Creating an ID stitcher for such an entity is possible but unnecessary.

Using all the models having ssn_id, we can just make a union of all ssn_id and get all distinct values of it and obtain the final list of sessions.

The underlying SQL will look as follows:

SELECT ssn_id AS session_id FROM sign_in
UNION
SELECT ssn_id AS session_id FROM sign_up;

YAML Changes

The YAML writer cannot define a custom ID collator the way they define a custom ID stitcher. If an entity has no edges, the PB project will automatically figure out if an ID collator is needed. To exclude certain inputs (having the required ID) from being used in the collation, we can just set to_id_stitcher: false in the input.

entities:
  - name: session
    id_column_name: session_id
    id_types:
      - ssn_id

The id_column_name is a new field added in the entity definition which will be the name of the ID column and it applies to both ID stitcher and ID collator.

In the ID collator, you won’t generate a UUID like in ID stitcher.

Comparing ID Collator and ID Stitcher

Questions? Contact us by email or on Slack