User Guide : Avalanche Data Loading Templates : Loading ServiceNow Data into Avalanche on AWS
 
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Loading ServiceNow Data into Avalanche on AWS
The ServiceNow_to_Avalanche_AWS template is used to load data from ServiceNow tables into a table in Actian Avalanche data warehouse hosted on the AWS Cloud.
When you run a configuration with this template, it creates a new table if it does not exist or inserts data to an existing table of the same name if it exists.
Before using the Template to load files from ServiceNow to Avalanche, you must perform the following:
• Confirm that the Avalanche data warehouse is running on AWS
• Obtain credentials for connecting to the Avalanche database (user name and password)
• If Integration Manager On-premise is used, do one of the following:
– Create ODBC DSN (as a System DSN) with the ODBC driver shipped with latest client runtime, which can be downloaded from https://esd.actian.com/ (select Product as Actian Avalanche, Release as Client Runtime, and Platform as Windows/Linux)
Setup ODBC DSN (as a System DSN) pointing to the Avalanche AWS instance
– In the connect string, replace the name of the driver based on the operating system:
For Windows, Driver=Actian CR
For Linux, configure a driver entry called Ingres in the odbcinst.ini file (if it is not already present).
To load ServiceNow data into an Avalanche data warehouse:
1. Select the ServiceNow_to_Avalanche_AWS configuration.
2. Set the values for the following required macros such as the ServiceNow connection information, connection string to your Avalanche data warehouse, and credentials for the database and S3 bucket.
Note:  You must provide values for these macros so that the Template has the necessary information to access your data files, Avalanche warehouse, and find or create your table.
You can encrypt sensitive macro values (such as passwords, secret keys, and tokens for token based authentication) from Integration Manager. For information about encrypting, see Enable Macro Encryption section.
 
Macro Name
Description
$(AVALANCHE_CONNECT_STRING)
ODBC Connection string for connecting to Avalanche database. You can obtain this information from Avalanche portal.
Note:  This is required only if you are running Integration Manager on DataCloud.
$(AVALANCHE_USERNAME)
$(AVALANCHE_PASSWORD)
Credentials for connecting to the database.
$(AVALANCHE_TABLE)
Name of the table in Avalanche where the data will be written to.
Note:  Do not encrypt this macro value.
$(SERVICENOW_URL)
URL of the service now instance. For example, https://myorg.service-now.com/.
$(SERVICENOW_USERNAME)
$(SERVICENOW_PASSWORD)
Credentials for connecting to the ServiceNow instance.
$(SERVICENOW_TABLE)
Name of the table in ServiceNow.
The following macros are used for temporarily staging the data in a S3 bucket.
 
Macro Name
Description
$(AWS_ACCESS_KEY)
$(AWS_SECRET_KEY)
Credentials for accessing AWS services.
$(AWS_BUCKET_NAME)
Name of the AWS storage bucket to pull the data from.
$(AWS_REGION)
Region ID of the location that hosts the specific S3 bucket.
The supported regions are:
• US East (N. Virginia)
• US East (Ohio)
• US West (Oregon)
• Europe (Ireland)
• Europe (London)
• Europe (Frankfurt)
You can specify the region in the above format or in the following format:
• us-east-1
• us-east-2
• us-west-2
• eu-west-1
• eu-west-2
• eu-central-1
Note:  Region information is case and format sensitive. If you do not enter the region value correctly, then the template will fail during execution. Avalanche cluster and the bucket must be in the same region.
3. If you want to override any of the default settings, you can add the following macros and set the values. Usually, these are not required unless you have a specific data format/encoding or want to increase the sample size, or want to specify the table operation. These macros are not displayed by default. You can manually add the name and set the value to override the default value.
 
Macro Name
Description
$(SERVICENOW_URL_ENCODED_QUERY)
ServiceNow URL-friendly query string which specifies the criteria to filter the returned records.
$(SERVICENOW_BATCH_SIZE)
Number of records that the connector reads at one time from ServiceNow. Default is 10000.
$(SERVICENOW_USE_DISPLAY_VALUES)
When this property is set to True, it returns string display values for all fields. If it is set to False, it returns the raw data types and values for all fields. Default is True.
$(AVALANCHE_DSN)
Name of the ODBC data source for connecting to Avalanche database. Specify this macro if you want to use a pre-configured DSN on your system instead of the connect string.
$(AVALANCHE_CREATE_TABLE_QUERY)
Create table statement to use for creating the table. Make sure partitioning is specified. Table name in the query must match the AVALANCHE_TABLE macro value.
$(AVALANCHE_CREATE_TABLE_OPTIONS)
Use this option when you do not want to build the complete query but only want to specify options to pass to "with" clause of create table query.
Note:  Make sure partitioning is specified. Also, this macro is ignored if AVALANCHE_CREATE_TABLE_QUERY macro is defined.
$(OUTPUT_MODE)
Table operations that must be performed before inserting data. The available operations are:
• replace: Drops existing table and creates new table
• delete_append: Truncates table before inserting.
• append: Creates table only if it does not exist and inserts records.
The default value is append.
$(DEFAULT_TEXT_COL_SIZE)
Set the default size of the text columns in the table. Set it to a reasonable value based on your data to avoid truncations.
This property is also useful for inserting double-byte characters like Japanese or Chinese. Varchar is used for text data types that supports single byte characters. To support double-byte characters in varchar data type, the size of the column must be doubled using this macro.
$(UNICODE_CHARS)
Indicates whether the data contains Unicode characters. If set to True, nvarchar data type is used for text columns.
$(BATCH_SIZE)
Size of the chunk (in terms of number of records), the source is split into. Default is 50000.
$(COPYVW_PARALLEL_LOAD_SIZE)
Number of chunks to load in parallel using COPY VWLOAD. The default value is 20.
$(AVALANCHE_DBADMIN_GROUP_ACCESS)
Grant table access for "dbadmingrp" group. Only applicable when new table is created. Default is True.
$(TRUNCATION_HANDLING)
Specifies truncation handling for text data. The supported values are:
• ignore - Ignores the truncation and continues the execution. This is the default value.
• warn - Logs a warning about truncation and continues the execution.
• error - Logs an error message and aborts the execution.
Note:  
You can specify individual column sizes by defining macros in the format COL_SIZE_XXX, where XXX is the source field name in uppercase. This is only applicable for fields of text type.

You can specify the VWLOAD options with macro names in the VW_XXX format, where XXX is the property name listed in the COPY VWLOAD section in the Avalanche documentation. One macro can be added for each property. FDELIM, RDELIM, QUOTE, AWS credentials must be specified using specific macros for these properties. For example:
VW_NULLS = NULL
VW_STRICTNULLS = STRICTNULLS
4. Run the configuration.
If there are any errors during job execution, see Troubleshooting Template Configuration Execution Errors for the troubleshooting information.