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Google Drive Setup Guide

Justin Stevenson
Updated

Google Drive Setup Guide

Follow our setup guide to connect Google Drive to Fivetran.

Prerequisites

To connect Google Drive to Fivetran, you need:

  • A
  • A Google Drive folder containing files with supported and
  • The URL of your Google Drive folder that you want to sync
  • The ability to grant Fivetran permission to read from this account

Setup instructions

Begin Fivetran configuration

  1. In the , select the sync strategy: Magic Folder or Merge Mode.

  2. Enter the Destination schema name of your choice.

  3. If you selected Merge Mode as your sync strategy, enter the Destination table name.

  4. Find the auto-generated email address of the Fivetran service account and make a note of it. You will need it to share your Google Drive folder with Fivetran.

    We create a Google service account for your Fivetran account because the service account authentication method provides fine-grained control over access to your data. You add the unique Fivetran service account as a read-only user to the specific folders that you want to sync.

Share Google Drive folder with Fivetran

  1. Log in to your Google Drive account and navigate to the folder from which you want to sync the files.

    NOTE: Make sure that the folder is not empty. We can't sync empty folders.

  2. Click the folder you want to sync and then click Share.

    Share google drive folder

  3. In the Share with people and groups window, enter the email address that you found in .

  4. Select Viewer permissions and then click Send.

    Add service account to Google Drive

Add Google Drive configuration

Magic Folder

In the setup form, enter your Folder URL. Make sure your URL (https:// is optional) looks similar to the one illustrated below and doesn't have any extra characters after the folder ID. The URL specifies the folder path in your Google Drive in which you'd like Fivetran to look for files. We examine any files under the specified folder, except the nested subfolders, for files we can sync.

Get folder url

Merge Mode

  1. In the setup form, choose your configuration options. Using these configuration options, you can select subsets of your folders, specific types of files, and more to sync only the files you need in your destination. In addition, setting up multiple Google Drive connectors targeted at the same file system but with different options allows you to slice and dice a file system any way you'd like, to get exactly the data you want into each table.

    You can use the following configuration options:

    • Folder URL - Use the folder url (https:// is optional) to specify a portion of the file system in which you'd like Fivetran to look for files. We examine files under the specified folder and all of its nested sub-folders for files we can sync.

    • (Optional) File Pattern - Use a regular expression as the file pattern to decide whether or not to sync specific files. The pattern applies to everything under the prefix (folder path). If you're unsure what regular expression to use, you can leave this field blank, and we'll sync everything under the prefix.

      For example, if under the prefix logs, you have three folders: 2017, 2016, and errors. Using the pattern \d\d\d\d/.*, you can exclude all the files in the errors folder because:

      • \d\d\d\d only applies to the folders whose name consists of four consecutive digits, and
      • .* after / applies to any files in these folders

      TIP: You can learn to and .

    • File Type - Use the file type to choose the parsing strategy for files without file extensions. If you save your files with improper extensions, you can force them to be synced as the selected file type.

      • If you select infer, we infer the type from a file's extension (.csv, .tsv, .json, .avro, or .log).

        NOTE: If you have XML files, don't select infer. We sync XML files only when you select the file type as xml. For more information about the file size, see .

      • If you choose a file type, we interpret every file we examine as the file type you select, so make sure everything we sync has the same file type.

        For example, if you have an automated CSV output system that saves files without a .csv extension, you can specify the type as csv, and we will sync them correctly as CSVs.

      • If you select xml, we load your XML data into the _data column without flattening it.

    • (Optional) JSON Delivery Mode - Available when JSON or JSONL is selected in File Type. Use this option to choose how Fivetran should handle your JSON data.

      • If you select Packed, we load all your JSON data into the _data column without flattening it.
      • If you select Unpacked, we flatten one level of columns and infer their data types.

    • Compression - Use the compression option to choose the compression strategy to decompress files without compression extensions. If your files are compressed but do not have extensions indicating the compression method, you can decompress them according to the selected compression algorithm.

      • If all of your compressed files are correctly marked with a matching compression extension (.bz2, .gz, .gzip, .tar, or .zip), you can select infer.

      • If you select uncompressed, we do not decompress the files and sync the uncompressed files.

      • If you choose a compression format, we decompress every file using the format you select.

        For example, if you have an automated CSV output system that GZIPs files to save space but saves them without a .gzip extension, you can set this field to GZIP. We will decompress every file that we examine using GZIP.

    • Error Handling - Use the error handling option to choose how to handle errors in your files. If you know that your files contain some errors, you can choose to skip poorly formatted lines.

      • If you select skip, we ignore improperly formatted data within a file, allowing you to sync only valid data.

      • If you select fail, we do not sync a file if we detect improperly formatted data in the file.

        TIP: We recommend that you select fail unless you are sure that you have undesirable, malformed data.

      You will receive a notification on your Fivetran dashboard if we encounter errors.

  2. (Optional) To use the advanced configuration options, set the Enable Advanced Options toggle to ON.

    You can use the following configuration options for specific use cases:

    • Modified File Merge - Use this option to let Fivetran know how to update files in the destination. When you modify a previously synced file, should we replace the rows in the destination table or append the new rows to the table:

      • upsert_file replaces records in destination, using the filename and line number as the primary key.

      • append_file appends records.

    • Archive Folder Pattern - Use a regular expression to filter and sync files from archived folders. We sync the files in compressed archives with filenames matching the specified pattern. If there are multiple files within archive (TAR or ZIP) folders, you can use the archive folder pattern to filter file types.

      For example, if you specify the archive folder pattern as .*json, we will sync only the files that end in a .json file extension from the archive folder.

    • (Optional) Null Sequence - Specify the value indicating null if your CSVs use a special value indicating null.

      Only use this field if you are sure your CSVs have a null sequence. CSVs have no native notion of a null character. However, some CSV generators have created one, using characters such as \N to represent null.

      TIP: The text is un-escaped before the null sequence is matched, so don't use the escape character in your null sequence.

    • (Optional) Delimiter - Specify the delimiter. The delimiter is a character used in files to separate one field from the next. Fivetran tries to infer the delimiter, but in some cases, this is impossible. If your files sync with the wrong number of columns or uses a unique delimiter, consider setting this value. For example, if you have tab-delimited files, you must enter \t, and if you have pipe-delimited files, enter |.

      • If you leave this field blank, we infer the delimiter for each file. You can store files of many different types of delimiters in the same folder with no problems.

      • If you specify a delimiter, we parse all the CSV, TSV, and TXT files in your folder path with this delimiter.

      NOTE: You can also specify a multi-character delimiter in this field. A custom multi-character delimiter (excluding "\t" and "\s") should be mentioned only if the source contains only csv files, else it might lead to data integrity issues for other files. The length of custom multi-character delimiter should not exceed 15 characters.

    • (Optional) Escape Character - Set the escape character if your CSV generator follows non-standard rules for escaping quotation marks.

      Only use this field if you are sure your CSVs have a different escape character. CSVs have a special rule for escaping quotation marks compared to other characters; they require two consecutive double quotes to represent an escaped double quote. However, some CSV generators do not follow this rule and use different characters like backslash for escaping.

    • (Optional) Skip Header Lines - Use this option to skip over fixed-length headers at the beginning of your CSV files. Set the toggle to ON, and then in the Number of skipped header lines field, specify the number of header lines you want to skip.

      Some CSV-generating programs include additional header lines or empty lines at the top of the file. The header consists of a few lines that do not match the format of the rest of the rows in the file. These header rows can cause undesired behavior because we attempt to parse them as if they were records in your CSV.

    • (Optional) Skip Footer Lines - Use this option to skip over fixed-length footers at the end of your CSV files. Set the toggle to ON, and then in the Number of skipped footer lines field, specify the number of footer lines you want to skip.

      Some CSV-generating programs include a footer at the bottom of the file. The footer consists of a few lines that do not match the format of the rest of the rows in the file. These footer rows can cause undesired behavior because we attempt to parse them as if they were records in your CSV.

    • (Optional) Headerless Files - Set the toggle to ON if your CSV-generating software doesn't provide a header line for the documents. Fivetran can generate the generic column names and sync data rows with them.

      Some CSV-generating programs do not include column name headers for the files; they only contain data rows. When you set the toggle to ON, we generate generic column names following the convention of column_0, column_1, ... column_n to map the rows.

    • (Optional) Line Separator - Specify the custom line separator for your CSV files. The line separator is used in files to separate one row from the next.

      • If you leave this field blank, we use the new line character \n as the line separator by default.

      • If you specify a line separator, we parse all the CSV files in your folder path with this line separator.

Finish Fivetran configuration

Click Save & Test. Fivetran will take it from here and sync your data from your Google Drive.

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