Shard feed files

Depending on your inventory, sharding (or breaking up feeds into multiple files) may be necessary.

Note: Sharding might only be applicable to some of the feeds you submit and is dependent on the type of inventory submitted. Please reach out to your Google contact if you are unsure of the best approach.

When to use sharding

• Feed exceeds 200 MB for 1 file (after gzip compression).

  • Example: Generated availability feed is 1 GB. This should be sharded to 5+ separate files (or shards).

• Partner inventory is distributed across systems and/or regions resulting in difficulty reconciling the inventory.

  • Example: Partner has US and EU inventory that live in separate systems. The feed may be generated with 2 files (or shards), 1 for US, and 1 for EU with the same nonce and generation_timestamp.

Note: Before using sharding, make sure you are compressing your feed uploads with gzip. Using gzip can reduce feed size by 10x or more, and may allow you to skip or defer sharding your feed.

General rules

• Each shard cannot exceed 200 MB for 1 file (after gzip compression).
• We recommend no more than 20 shards per feed. If you have a business justification that requires more than that amount, please contact support for further instruction.
• Individual records (one Merchant object for example) must be sent in one shard, they cannot be split across multiple shards. However, they don't have to be sent in the shard with the same shard_number for future feeds.
• For better performance, your data should be split evenly among the shards so that all sharded files are similar in size.

Note: Google processes feed files as soon as they're uploaded to the SFTP server. If the feed is sharded into multiple files, the process begins after you upload the last file. If your feed contains errors, you receive an email with the feed error codes.

How to shard feeds

You can shard the events feed by splitting a single JSON into separate JSON files with non overlapping events and updating the file descriptor JSON with the list of JSON file names.

Recommended: For each file (or shard), set the filename to indicate the feed type, the timestamp and the shard number. Shards should be roughly equal in size and are processed once all shards are uploaded.

Sharded example

File descriptor - event.feeddata.v1_1728306001.filedescriptor.json

{
  "generation_timestamp": 1728306001,
  "name": "event.feeddata.v1",
  "data_file": [
    "event.feeddata.v1_1728306001_001.json",
    "event.feeddata.v1_1728306001_002.json"
  ]
}

Shard 0 - event.feeddata.v1_1728306001_001.json

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "event-1",
      ...
    },
    {
      "id": "event-2",
      ...
    }
  ]
}

Shard 1 - event.feeddata.v1_1728306001_002.json

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "event-3",
      ...
    },
    {
      "id": "event-4",
      ...
    }
  ]
}

Shards for partner distributed inventory

It can be challenging for partners to consolidate inventory distributed across multiple systems and or regions into a single feed. Sharding can be used to resolve reconciliation challenges by setting each shard to match each distributed system's inventory set.

For example, say a partner's inventory is separated into 2 regions (US and EU inventory), which live in 2 separate systems.

The partner can break each feed into 2 files (or shards):

Use the following steps to ensure the feeds are properly processed:

1. Decide on an upload schedule, and configure each instance of inventory to follow the schedule.
2. Assign unique shard numbers for each instance (e.g. US = N, EU = N + 1). Set total_shards to the total number of shards.
3. At each scheduled upload time, decide on a generation_timestamp. In set all filenames to hold the same values for these two fields and list all expected file names in the descriptor file.
   • generation_timestamp should be current or recent past (ideally, the partner's read-at database timestamp)
4. After all shards are uploaded, Google groups the shards using generation_timestamp and nonce.

Note: Feeds/shards arriving separately at different times is supported, but coordinated schedules is best. Feed processing occurs only when all shards in a feed set are uploaded.

Google will process the feed as one even though each shard represents a different region of the partner's inventory and could be uploaded at a different time of the day as long as the generation_timestamp is the same across all shards.