Data Refresh: Merge, Update, Extend

Updating records is a critical component of live, integrated data systems. We provide you with the ability to update your dataset on a by-record basis using the data merging feature.

To update your data, you’ll need to create another folder with files that have exactly the same header as your original folder.

You can either replace rows in your original folder or extend them with new rows. To replace rows in the original file, the folder containing updates must have rows with a unique identifier that match rows in the original folder. Rows in the update folder that do not have a matching identifier will be added to the result.

All files in the base folder are treated as one dataset. All files in the update folder are treated as one set of updates. The resulting merged folder will contain one file with all the file contents of the base folder updated with all the updates in all the files in the update folder.

Here’s a walkthrough of the process to update a folder named “tutorialFolder3” with another folder named “tutorialFolder” using the web user interface. In this case tutorialFolder3 is all new rows, so we’re appending to the original rows in tutorialFolder.

To begin the action of merging folders, the “Merge Folders” button will activate a modal dialog to input the merge information. This modal has dropdown options to select the folder you want to update, the new folder with the new records, the column identifier to match records, the name of the output folder for this merge, and the name of the newly merged dataset. In this example, the name of the column to match across files is simply ID.