Pokemon details in parallel using transformers

info

The source code for this example can be found in our repository at: https://github.com/dlt-hub/dlt/tree/devel/docs/examples/transformers

About this Example

For this example, we will be loading Pokemon data from the PokeAPI with the help of transformers to load Pokemon details in parallel.

We'll learn how to:

• create 2 transformers and connect them to a resource with the pipe operator |;
• load these transformers in parallel using the @dlt.defer decorator;
• configure parallelism in the config.toml file;
• deselect the main resource, so it will not be loaded into the database;
• importing and using a pre-configured requests library with automatic retries (from dlt.sources.helpers import requests).

Full source code

import dlt
from dlt.sources.helpers import requests


@dlt.source(max_table_nesting=2)
def source(pokemon_api_url: str):
    # note that we deselect `pokemon_list` - we do not want it to be loaded
    @dlt.resource(write_disposition="replace", selected=False)
    def pokemon_list():
        """Retrieve a first page of Pokemons and yield it. We do not retrieve all the pages in this example"""
        yield requests.get(pokemon_api_url).json()["results"]

    # transformer that retrieves a list of objects in parallel
    @dlt.transformer
    def pokemon(pokemons):
        """Yields details for a list of `pokemons`"""

        # @dlt.defer marks a function to be executed in parallel
        # in a thread pool
        @dlt.defer
        def _get_pokemon(_pokemon):
            return requests.get(_pokemon["url"]).json()

        # call and yield the function result normally, the @dlt.defer takes care of parallelism
        for _pokemon in pokemons:
            yield _get_pokemon(_pokemon)

    # a special case where just one item is retrieved in transformer
    # a whole transformer may be marked for parallel execution
    @dlt.transformer(parallelized=True)
    def species(pokemon_details):
        """Yields species details for a pokemon"""
        species_data = requests.get(pokemon_details["species"]["url"]).json()
        # link back to pokemon so we have a relation in loaded data
        species_data["pokemon_id"] = pokemon_details["id"]
        # You can return the result instead of yield since the transformer only generates one result
        return species_data

    # create two simple pipelines with | operator
    # 1. send list of pokemons into `pokemon` transformer to get pokemon details
    # 2. send pokemon details into `species` transformer to get species details
    # NOTE: dlt is smart enough to get data from pokemon_list and pokemon details once

    return (pokemon_list | pokemon, pokemon_list | pokemon | species)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    # build duck db pipeline
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="pokemon", destination="duckdb", dataset_name="pokemon_data"
    )

    # the pokemon_list resource does not need to be loaded
    load_info = pipeline.run(source("https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon"))
    print(load_info)

    # verify that all went well
    row_counts = pipeline.last_trace.last_normalize_info.row_counts
    assert row_counts["pokemon"] == 20
    assert row_counts["species"] == 20
    assert "pokemon_list" not in row_counts