March 31, 2025: Sandbox Environment Added to the Mapping Canvas - Knowledge Base

General Release

We're thrilled to announce a powerful new feature in Reactor Data: the Mapping Sandbox! This highly anticipated addition empowers you to develop, test, and refine your data pipelines in a safe, isolated environment before impacting your live production data.

The Mapping Sandbox is designed to accelerate your development cycles and enhance data integrity by allowing you to experiment with new mappings, troubleshoot existing configurations, and validate transformations with confidence. This significantly reduces the risk associated with deploying changes directly to your live data flows.

Key Benefits of the Mapping Sandbox

Risk-Free Experimentation: Develop and test new data mapping configurations without affecting live production data or ongoing ETL workflows.
Faster Iteration: Quickly iterate on mapping logic, test different transformation rules, and validate outputs in an isolated environment.
Enhanced Data Quality: Thoroughly validate your data transformations before promotion, ensuring accuracy and consistency in your production data.
Intuitive Workflow: The Sandbox interface is largely identical to the Production environment, ensuring a seamless transition between development and deployment.

How it Works

The Mapping Sandbox operates as a staging environment where you can load existing production configurations or start new drafts. While in Sandbox, the UI pulls from live data sources only on mapper replay (streaming data is not supported). You can also configure targets specifically for Sandbox on the Destinations page, which are separate from your Production targets.

You'll know you're in the Sandbox by the prominent Sandbox/Production toggle in the top ribbon and the distinct light-yellow background of the mapping canvas.

Once you've developed and thoroughly tested your configuration in Sandbox, you can easily promote it to Production. When a model is deployed from Sandbox, the saved model is deployed to Production, and then discarded from Sandbox, keeping your Sandbox environment fresh for your next project.

Demo: Adding New Fields and Mapping in the Sandbox

Watch this quick demo to see the Mapping Sandbox in action! In this video, we'll walk through a common use case: adding three new fields to an existing pipeline on the mapping canvas and then mapping these fields to two separate pre-existing source mapping model configurations within that pipeline. See how easy it is to test and validate these changes in the Sandbox before promoting them to Production.

We believe the Mapping Sandbox will be an invaluable tool for all Reactor Data users, streamlining your data engineering workflows and enhancing your ability to manage complex ETL processes with greater control and confidence.

For more detailed instructions on using the Mapping Sandbox, please refer to our updated documentation: Building, Updating, and Testing Mappings in Sandbox Mode.

Are you interested in learning more about Reactor Early Access? Please do not hesitate to contact our Customer Success team for more information!