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Working with buffers

Buffers are central to Tyger, serving as the mechanism for transmitting and storing signal data. They are Azure Blob storage containers, with data stored in a series of blobs.

Buffers follow a Write Once Read Many (WORM) principle and cannot be overwritten (unless you bypass tyger and directly manipulate the underlying storage container). The integrity of each blob is ensured through hash verification during reading and writing, with a cumulative hash of hashes checked for each blob to ensure the integrity of the sequence of blobs.

Creating a buffer

To create a buffer, run:

bash
tyger buffer create

This command will output the new buffer's ID, which is used for operations like buffer reading, buffer writing, and creating runs.

Writing to a buffer

To write to a buffer, you will use tyger buffer write ID. The simplest way to use the command is to pipe data from another process into it. For testing purposes, you can use tyger buffer gen SIZE to generate arbitrary data:

bash
tyger buffer gen 10G | tyger buffer write $buffer

Here, $buffer is typically the buffer ID, but it can also be an access URL or a file path containing an access URL.

In cases of high latency to the Azure region hosting the storage account, increase parallelism with the --dop parameter (by default, up to 16 blobs are uploaded concurrently).

Additionally, you can specify the blob size with --block-size, for example, --block-size 16M. The default block size is 4MB. No data is sent until the specified block size is reached or the stream ends.

Instead of standard in, you can use -i|--input to read from a file or named pipe.

Reading from buffers

Reading from buffers is similar to writing:

bash
tyger buffer read $buffer > destination_file

tyger buffer read continues until it has read the entire buffer, the buffer is marked as failed, or an unrecoverable error occurs.

As with the write command, the $buffer argument is typically the buffer ID. It can also be an access URL or a file path containing an access URL.

read also supports the --dop parameter for parallelism control and -o|--output for writing to a file instead of standard output.

Buffer access URLs

To get an access URL for tyger buffer read or tyger buffer write, run:

bash
tyger buffer access $buffer_id [-w|--write]

Access URLs are valid for one hour and are read-only by default, unless -w|--write is specified.

These URLs can be used with a tyger CLI that isn't logged in.

Tagging buffers

Buffers can be tagged with key-value metadata pairs. You can assign tags to a buffer when creating it like this:

bash
buffer_id=$(tyger buffer create --tag mykey1=myvalue1 --tag mykey2=myvalue2)

You can view the tags on a buffer with:

bash
tyger buffer show $buffer_id

The response looks like:

json
{
  "id": "yf4sx2aqzitepjhmxjhanomn5e",
  "etag": "638418036499348393",
  "createdAt": "2024-01-25T18:20:49.951262Z",
  "tags": {
    "mykey1": "myvalue1",
    "mykey2": "myvalue2"
  }
}

Update a buffer's tags with:

bash
tyger buffer set $buffer_id --tag myKey1=myvalue1Updated --tag mykey3=myvalue3
json
{
  "id": "yf4sx2aqzitepjhmxjhanomn5e",
  "etag": "638418039170119977",
  "createdAt": "2024-01-25T18:20:49.951262Z",
  "tags": {
    "myKey1": "myvalue1Updated",
    "mykey2": "myvalue2",
    "mykey3": "myvalue3"
  }
}

To replace the entire set of tags, specify --clear-tags:

bash
tyger buffer set $buffer_id --clear-tags --tag myKey1=yetAnotherValue
json
{
  "id": "yf4sx2aqzitepjhmxjhanomn5e",
  "etag": "638418039170119988",
  "createdAt": "2024-01-25T18:20:49.951262Z",
  "tags": {
    "myKey1": "yetAnotherValue",
  }
}

Use the --etag parameter to ensure the set command only succeeds if there have been no changes to the buffer since the last show command.

Listing buffers

You can list buffers with:

bash
tyger buffer list [--tag KEY=VALUE] [--limit N]

Results are ordered by descending creation time and are limited by the --limit value. If no limit is set, a maximum of 1000 buffers are returned with a warning if more exist.

To filter the results by tags:

bash
tyger buffer list --tag mykey1=myvalue1
json
[
  {
    "id": "yf4sx2aqzitepjhmxjhanomn5e",
    "etag": "638418036499348393",
    "createdAt": "2024-01-25T18:20:49.951262Z",
    "tags": {
      "mykey1": "myvalue1",
      "mykey2": "myvalue2"
    }
  }
]

All tag arguments must match:

bash
tyger buffer list --tag mykey1=myvalue1 --tag mykey2=myvalue2
json
[
  {
    "id": "yf4sx2aqzitepjhmxjhanomn5e",
    "etag": "638418036499348393",
    "createdAt": "2024-01-25T18:20:49.951262Z",
    "tags": {
      "mykey1": "myvalue1",
      "mykey2": "myvalue2"
    }
  }
]
bash
tyger buffer list --tag mykey1=myvalue1 --tag missingkey=missingvalue
json
[]