Data lake name sequence

Question

Hi friends, when creating Azure Data Lake the containers are sorted by alphabetical order, it looks a bit incorrect order :

bronze,

landing zone

gold

silver

I want it in the landing, bronze, silver, and gold orders. How can I do that? Is there a workaround? Please suggest one. Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi azure_learner ,
Azure Data Lake containers are sorted alphabetically by default, and there isn't a built-in feature to customize the order directly.
you can consider the following workaround:
Metadata or Tags: Use metadata or tags to indicate the order. While this won't change the display order in the Azure portal, it can help in programmatically managing and accessing the containers in the desired sequence.
Custom Application: Develop a custom application or script that lists the containers in the desired order. This application can fetch the container names and display them in the order you prefer.
Documentation: Maintain documentation or a reference guide for users to understand the intended order of the containers.

---

Please do not forget to "Accept the answer” and “up-vote” wherever the information provided helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members. If you have any other questions or are still running into more issues, let me know in the "comments" 

Answer 2

Hi azure_learner ,
Thanks for posting your query on Microsoft Q&A.
The order of containers in Azure Data Lake. By default, Azure sorts of containers alphabetically, which can indeed lead to an order that doesn't match your desired sequence.
One workaround is to prefix the container names with numbers to enforce the order you want. For example:

1. 01-landing-zone
2. 02-bronze
3. 03-silver
4. 04-gold

This way, the containers will appear in the correct sequence regardless of alphabetical sorting.
Data lake synonyms in use Raw layer = staging = bronze = landing zone.
The Bronze layer is where we land all the data from source systems. The table structures in this layer correspond to the source system table structures “as-is,” aside from optional metadata columns that can be added to capture the load date/time, process ID, etc.

In most cases, it's a good idea to keep the data in the Bronze layer in Delta format, so that subsequent reads from the Bronze layer for ETL are performant — and so that you can do updates in Bronze to write CDC changes. Sometimes, when data arrives in JSON or XML formats, we do see customers landing it in the original source data format and then stage it by changing it to Delta format. So sometimes, we see customers manifest the logical Bronze layer into a physical landing and staging zone.

It's important to plan your data structure before you land it into a data lake. Having a plan helps you use security, partitioning, and processing effectively.

For more details, refer to Data lake zones and containers.

---

Please do not forget to "Accept the answer” and “up-vote” wherever the information provided helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members. If you have any other questions or are still running into more issues, let me know in the "comments" .