How to solve Azure hosted Integration Runtime (IR) validation error in Synapse Analytics?

This blog post shares recent learning while working with Data flows in Azure Synapse Analytics.

The ETL pipeline was developed using Azure Synapse Data Flows. However, when attempting to merge the code changes made in the feature branch into the main branch of the DevOps code repository, a validation error occurred, as shown below in Figure 1:

Fig 1: Validation error

It is worth noting that the same pipeline was executed in Debug mode, and it ran successfully without encountering any errors, as depicted in Figure 2.:

Fig 2: Successfully run on debug mode

On the one hand, when trying to merge the code into the main branch from the feature branch it throws a validation error, on the other hand, the pipeline executed successfully in the debug mode. It seems a bug and reported it to the Microsoft Synapse team.

The validation error needed to be fixed so that the code can be released to the Production environment. The Azure Integration run time (IR) was used in the Data flows created by using the Canada Central region. However, IR must need to use 'Auto Resolve' as shown in Fig 3. 

Fig 3: Region as 'Auto Resolve'

And used the newly created IR in the pipeline which resolved the issue.

In summary, though your Azure resources can be created under one particular region e.g. all our resources are created under the region Canada Central, but; for Synapse Data Flows activity you need to create Azure IR by choosing Auto Resolve as the region.