Connect to Syncsort

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Syncsort helps you break down data silos by integrating legacy, mainframe, and IBM data with Databricks. You can easily pull data from these sources into Delta Lake.

Here are the steps for using Syncsort with Databricks.

Step 1: Generate a Databricks personal access token

Syncsort authenticates with Databricks using a Databricks personal access token.

Note

As a security best practice when you authenticate with automated tools, systems, scripts, and apps, Databricks recommends that you use OAuth tokens.

If you use personal access token authentication, Databricks recommends using personal access tokens belonging to service principals instead of workspace users. To create tokens for service principals, see Manage tokens for a service principal.

Step 2: Set up a cluster to support integration needs

Syncsort will write data to an S3 bucket and the Databricks integration cluster will read data from that location. Therefore the integration cluster requires secure access to the S3 bucket.

Secure access to an S3 bucket

To access AWS resources, you can launch the Databricks integration cluster with an instance profile. The instance profile should have access to the staging S3 bucket and the target S3 bucket where you want to write the Delta tables. To create an instance profile and configure the integration cluster to use the role, follow the instructions in Tutorial: Configure S3 access with an instance profile.

As an alternative, you can use IAM credential passthrough, which enables user-specific access to S3 data from a shared cluster.

Specify the cluster configuration

  1. Set Cluster Mode to Standard.

  2. Set Databricks Runtime Version to a Databricks runtime version.

  3. Enable optimized writes and auto compaction by adding the following properties to your Spark configuration:

    spark.databricks.delta.optimizeWrite.enabled true
    spark.databricks.delta.autoCompact.enabled true
    
  4. Configure your cluster depending on your integration and scaling needs.

For cluster configuration details, see Compute configuration reference.

See Get connection details for a Databricks compute resource for the steps to obtain the JDBC URL and HTTP path.

Step 3: Obtain JDBC and ODBC connection details to connect to a cluster

To connect a Databricks cluster to Syncsort you need the following JDBC/ODBC connection properties:

  • JDBC URL

  • HTTP Path

Step 4: Configure Syncsort with Databricks

Go to the Databricks and Connect for Big Data login page and follow the instructions.

Additional resources

Support