dropDuplicates

BradSheridan
Databricks Partner

Afternoon Community!! I've done some research today and found multiple, great approaches to accomplish what I'm trying to do, but having trouble understanding exactly which is best suited for my use case.

Suppose you're running Auto Loader on S3 and ultimately that data coming in will end up in a Delta table that already has billions of rows. What is the best way to find out if any records that are coming in already exist in the target table? Yes, there is a unique identifier (an MD5 hash of 12 columns) to compare on, but isn't it not really scalable to look through billions of records over and over again? thoughts?

thanks!

p.s. I got my Databricks swag today after spending my points and while I always love a great tshirt, the cooler bag is sooooo incredibly awesome!