June 2019 Summaries

In a recent podcast episode titled "Drill to Detail," Fivetran Co-Founder Katie Chin made an appearance as a guest. The company offers a trial period for users interested in their services. This brief description provides information about the podcast's content and participants, highlighting Katie Chin's involvement.

Fivetran and Pendo have partnered to simplify data engineering tasks for businesses. Pendo enables organizations to capture user behavior within their products without coding, while Fivetran streamlines the process of setting up and maintaining data infrastructure. By combining these two platforms, companies can track user activity, centralize ready-to-query user data in a cloud warehouse, and transform that data as needed without diverting engineering resources. This partnership allows businesses to optimize their engineering resources and focus on high-impact projects.

Fivetran has introduced a new Eloqua connector, allowing users to centralize their Eloqua data and evaluate email-marketing and demand-generation performance. Oracle's Eloqua platform provides B2B marketers with advanced lead and campaign management tools, real-time reporting, and insights. By combining Eloqua data with other sources like Salesforce, users can gain a deeper understanding of their email campaigns' performance and return on investment. The connector setup documentation is available, and support is provided for any questions.

Fivetran has introduced a new connector that allows users to centralize their Appsflyer data, enabling them to analyze the performance of app download campaigns and make better decisions. By integrating this data with other sources like Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and LinkedIn Ads, analysts can determine the most efficient allocation of advertising spend. The connector setup documentation provides schema information and instructions for setting up the connector.

Fivetran has integrated with Marketo Engage, allowing businesses to centralize their marketing data and make data-driven decisions. This integration enables marketers to combine data from various sources into one modern cloud warehouse for advanced analytics, multi-touch attribution, and more. The partnership aims to provide comprehensive insights into customer behavior and marketing performance, ultimately driving business results. Marketo customers can deploy Fivetran connectors directly from LaunchPoint, Marketo's partner ecosystem.

When performing arithmetic operations across SQL columns, it is crucial to handle NULL values appropriately, as these can result in entire records being invalidated if not managed correctly. For example, in a sales record scenario with varying jurisdictions and product categories, NULL values in columns such as sales tax or hazardous materials fees can lead to inaccurate total cost calculations when using simple addition. The COALESCE function can be employed to substitute NULL values with a default value, such as zero, ensuring that calculations yield accurate results even in the presence of missing data. This approach is emphasized with the introduction of Fivetran Transformations, which allows for more efficient data handling within data warehouses.

At Snowflake Summit 2019, Fivetran received the Best Customer-Focused Integration award from Snowflake. The recognition highlighted two achievements: a seamless integration with Snowflake via Partner Connect and quick delivery of new connectors in response to customer requests. Both companies are cloud-first infrastructure providers that aim for ease of use and rapid insights for their customers. Fivetran is a Snowflake Platinum Partner, having over 180 joint customers and multiple awards under its belt.

Fivetran has introduced a new feature, Fivetran Transformations, which automates in-warehouse transformations and simplifies essential data engineering tasks. This enables analysts to focus on their jobs without relying on valuable engineering resources or worrying about data quality. The tool allows users to set up, trigger, and manage transformations with ease, making it easier for businesses to adopt modern cloud-based data tools and build a data-driven culture. Fivetran Transformations is currently available for early access to all customers.

Charles Wang's article discusses the rapid growth of data and how it is affecting businesses. He highlights that 90% of the world's data was generated in just two years, with the volume, variety, and complexity of data continuing to increase as new streaming and web-based services emerge. The Internet of Things (IoT) will also contribute significantly to this growth. Wang emphasizes how technological change has made powerful business tools accessible to small organizations with limited resources, leading to increased disruption in various industries. He suggests that businesses should leverage managed services in the cloud for their data infrastructure, as it provides access to a wide range of products and services while reducing operational costs and preserving engineers' labor and expertise.

Fivetran's column hashing feature allows users to anonymize personally identifiable information while preserving its analytical value, ensuring GDPR compliance. Hashing is a one-way operation that cannot be reversed and can be used to anonymize data such as PII in the warehouse. The feature enables joining across datasets without exposing sensitive data. To set it up, users need to select the columns they want to hash in the connector detail view. Currently, hashing is available for several connectors including Dynamics 365, Marketo, MariaDB, MySQL, NetSuite, Oracle, Postgres, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SQL Server and Zuora. Fivetran adds an extra layer of security by using a unique salt per warehouse to ensure that the data cannot be decoded based on knowledge of the default algorithm.

Fivetran Transformations presents a simpler approach to modeling data for reports and dashboards, utilizing Extract-Load-Transform (ELT) instead of the traditional Extract-Transform-Load (ETL). Traditional ETL-based data pipelines involve complex handwritten scripts and numerous moving parts. In contrast, Fivetran Transformations allows analysts to write, schedule, and version-control transformations for their data within the data warehouse environment using SQL. This streamlined process eliminates the need for extensive configuration, scripting, and coding, making it more accessible and efficient for a wider audience.

Fivetran has introduced a new automated transformation tool called Fivetran Transformations, designed for enterprise use. The streamlined tool enhances recovery from failure, optimizes performance, and enables end-to-end resilient data infrastructure. It allows users to execute SQL when new data arrives or on a schedule. Currently available for Snowflake's warehouse platform, support for additional database and warehouse destinations will be added soon. Fivetran Transformations is an extension of the company's existing 100+ pre-engineered data connectors and offers significant time-saving benefits by automating transformations within the data warehouse.

Fivetran has released Transformations, making it a full-fledged ELT tool that allows users to extract, load and transform data in the same environment. The two main purposes of transforming data are for legibility and organizational coherence, similar to Looker's approach to models, and to enhance the performance and cost characteristics of your data warehouse. There are two methods for transforming data: views, which are not stored on disk and materialized views, which are stored on disk due to their better performance. Fivetran Transformations uses the materialized views approach by constructing new tables and updating them on a schedule chosen by the user. The transformation layer in Fivetran can be used for various tasks such as revising, cleaning, computing, separating, and integrating data.