Many DataFlow operations may cause data to be staged to disk temporarily. For example, sorting a large set of data will cause sorted segments of the data to be staged and later merged together.

The data is staged to a file system in the form of files. The files are protected using normal file system security as mentioned previously. Temporary files written by DataFlow are owned by the user running the DataFlow jobs. Permissions on temporary files are set to prevent other users from accessing the files.