A data engineer is configuring a pipeline that will potentially see late-arriving, duplicate records.

To deduplicate data against previously processed records as it is inserted into a Delta table, you can use the merge operation with an insert-only clause. This allows you to insert new records that do not match any existing records based on a unique key, while ignoring duplicate records that match existing records. For example, you can use the following syntax:

MERGE INTO target_table USING source_table ON target_table.unique_key = source_table.unique_key WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN INSERT *

This will insert only the records from the source table that have a unique key that is not present in the target table, and skip the records that have a matching key. This way, you can avoid inserting duplicate records into the Delta table.

References:

https://docs.databricks.com/delta/delta-update.html#upsert-into-a-table-using-merge

https://docs.databricks.com/delta/delta-update.html#insert-only-merge