AI engineering glossary · Data engineering
What is idempotency?
Idempotency: The property that running an operation more than once has the same final effect as running it once. Idempotent pipeline steps make retries and re-runs safe, since they cannot create duplicates or double counts.
Idempotency: an example
A job that overwrites the partition for 2026-09-01 gives the same table whether it runs once or three times.
Related terms
More Data engineering terms
- Incremental load
- JSON Lines
- Kappa architecture
- Lambda architecture
- Late-arriving data
- Lazy evaluation
- MapReduce
- Master data management
Where you learn it
Idempotency is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.