There are a lot of things I have found with each version of the Sitecore Data Exchange Framework that I wanted to explore, and others have asked me about. I will call them gems. These are things that might not always be used but can serve a good purpose I believe. I also wanted to get a higher understanding of what they do so here we are. I hope to go into more detail for each one in other blogs.

Telemetry Enabled

With telemetry enabled checkbox checked you can track the performance of each process. This information can be useful to IT support group as well as developers needed to know how the DEF process performs so adjustments can be made to processes/hardware for instance.

Create New Item

In the checkbox option below, it is defaulted as unchecked. Normally based on a unique field value a new item would be created when unchecked after checking if an existing item exists. Checking it the item will be only created in memory. There could be a variety of reasons to have an item in memory only. One of which would be for testing, it saves clean up time when you just need to test processing without worrying about getting rid of the Sitecore items.

Runtime Settings

This setting allows the pipeline step to be run on a different server. This saves resources on the Sitecore server. I can see this used for something where a lot of data is involved from a separate data source and/or if you finish extracting data from Sitecore another system can pick it up and continue. The DEF process can wait for that to be done and continue.

Verification

I have not used this, but from what I understand xDB analytics data migration would be logged here if you have a DEF process that does that. If you do not, make sure not to check any of the options. It can cause the DEF process not to work.

There are some more little gems I am going to look at for DEF in another blog. Also like I said before I am going to try and expand and go into more detail on each one of these. Let me know what you would like to see and I will try and cover it.