A pipeline that runs twice should produce the same result as one that runs once. That property is idempotency, and its absence is one of the most common sources of silent data corruption in integration systems. A partially completed run gets retried, the retry reprocesses records that already loaded, and the destination ends up with duplicates that neither the source system nor any monitoring alert ever surfaced.

Designing for idempotency is not complex, but it requires making explicit decisions about state management that are easy to skip when building the initial pipeline.

What Idempotency Means in Data Integration

An idempotent operation produces the same effect when applied once or multiple times.…