Connector Improvement: prevent updates for already-deleted records
Answered
In Fivetran's connector for Facebook Ads, records are updated every time even if they are "deleted" in Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/991073724257797
The object entity still exists in Facebook, but it has "status=deleted". Note that "deleted" just is a Facebook-assigned attribute. It does not generally mean that the record does not exist anymore. Thus APIs will still return data.
The consequence is that Fivetran connectors will use up MAR to update useless data -- effectively consuming credits for data that I do not care about.
(This request is related to private issue #57367 I was working on with Rory Hewson.)
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Official comment
Hi Bryan Estrada, Drew from the product team here!
Thanks for this request. Could I ask you for a few more details?
Is this related to the metadata schema or reports? Are "deleted" entities never useful to sync?
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Drew the facebook records that are deleted are part of the _metadata schema_, not reports. Here is an example object -- I presume Fivetran's connector invokes the marketing api to retrieve it:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/reference/ad-campaign-group/
There is an `effective_status` attribute that can be `DELETED`. This object is useful to know that it exists the first time and indeed every time that `effective_status<>DELETED`, but as soon as `effective_status == DELETED` the object will never change.
Because the object never changes, I do not expect Fivetran to import it every time basically telling me "your deleted object is still deleted". My data warehouse already knows that and the object is not going to change anymore. You cannot undelete an object like this in Facebook.
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Thank you for the confirmation. I'll work with engineering to evaluate how we can support.
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