December 2018 Summaries

The article by Charles Wang, dated December 20, 2018, provides a detailed guide on incrementally migrating data from Amazon Redshift tables using AWS Lambda. It focuses on leveraging AWS services to efficiently handle data transfers, ensuring that only the necessary data is moved, thereby optimizing performance and reducing costs. The process involves setting up triggers and using AWS Lambda functions to detect changes in data, which are then used to incrementally update the target database. This approach allows for real-time data processing and minimizes the need for full table scans, making it a scalable solution for managing large datasets in cloud environments.

Organizations often rely on data to drive business decisions, but it's crucial to differentiate between meaningful metrics and vanity metrics that may falsely indicate success without actually contributing to business goals such as revenue growth or customer satisfaction. The article highlights the pitfalls of using inappropriate metrics, using Microsoft's Bing as an example, where searches per user session were initially used as a key performance indicator. This led to unintended consequences, as developers focused on increasing clicks rather than delivering effective search results. The concept of the "Cobra Effect" is introduced to illustrate how poorly chosen metrics can lead to perverse incentives and negative outcomes. To avoid such issues, the article emphasizes the importance of connecting metrics to tangible business outcomes and customer satisfaction, suggesting that metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) offer a more reliable gauge of success. Ultimately, the article argues that metrics should align with the goals of making money and solving customer problems, ensuring they drive the right behaviors and decisions within an organization.

Iterable, an integrated cross-channel marketing platform, has joined the Fivetran partnership program. The collaboration aims to provide customers with a comprehensive data stack for driving data-based decision-making across their organizations. Fivetran is a leading automated data integration service that replicates and delivers data to supported destinations. This partnership will enable Iterable's clients to access real-time demographic, behavioral, and event data to trigger personalized messaging while blending all other supported data sources into a cloud warehouse.

Table Re-Sync, an innovative feature introduced by Fraser Harris on December 6, 2018, allows users to selectively re-sync tables in order to obtain necessary data when required. This is particularly useful for situations where operations are performed on a source table that incremental replication cannot detect, such as TRUNCATE. Previously, fixing resulting data integrity issues necessitated re-syncing an entire database. Table Re-Sync provides the ability to fix these issues at the table level, making the process simpler and more agile. This feature is currently available for Salesforce, NetSuite, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and SQL Server connectors. To use Table Re-Sync, users can go to their connector details page and hover over the desired table. Note that re-syncing a table will pause incremental updates until historical data is loaded.

Fivetran has secured $15 million in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners, with general partner Ilya Sukhar joining their board of directors. The company aims to replace the traditional ETL model of data warehousing with prebuilt, zero-maintenance data connectors. Over the past year, Fivetran has doubled its customer base and tripled its revenue, positioning itself as a key component in modern data stack alongside cloud-first data solutions like Snowflake, Looker, BigQuery, Periscope, etc. The funding will be used to scale operations, add new enterprise features, and expand data sources.

Fivetran, a company that centralizes data for businesses and enables cloud-first Snowflake, BigQuery, Looker, and more, has raised $15 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Matrix Partners, with general partner Ilya Sukhar joining the company's board of directors. Fivetran tripled its revenue in the past year and currently serves nearly 500 businesses, including Square, WeWork, and Vice Media. Founded in 2012 out of Y Combinator, Fivetran has emerged as a leader in cloud-based data replication services and aims to scale operations and grow the number of available enterprise features and data sources with its Series A funding.

Fivetran, a company aiming to centralize all data in one place for businesses, recently secured $15 million in Series A funding. Co-founders George Fraser and Taylor Brown shared their journey from being two friends in an apartment trying to create something people wanted, to having nearly 500 customers and 80 employees. The company's growth has been funded by revenue and seed investors. Fivetran plans to use the new funding to expand its data sources and features for large companies. The founders expressed gratitude towards their early adopters and partners like Snowflake and Looker, who have supported them throughout their journey.