Latticework Custom ETL: An Advanced Data Team to Custom-Build ETL Pipelines that Import Database & API Data into your Central Data Warehouse
An extremely common problem with brands is that you’ve got a super important data source - some mission-critical SaaS application that your company checks on every single day - that needs to be part of your Data Warehouse. Your team is super familiar with the data - either they’re logging into the website, or they’re downloading and exporting Excel spreadsheets. They just want to be able to combine it with other data living in the warehouse. So it seems like a simple ask: “Just connect to the API and copy the data into the database”. Or maybe “Just use one of those Cloud ETL companies to zip the data from point to A-to-B”. How long could this possibly take? What could possibly go wrong?
The answer unfortunately is “a million things”. We’ve seen this situation a hundred times. For any brand that’s tried building “Extract Load Transform” (ETL/ELT) pipelines themselves, they’ve experienced this special type of agony first-hand. It usually starts because that commercially available Cloud ETL app doesn’t support this one mission-critical source. So then, someone whips up a quick Python script to connect to the API. But there’s a weird authentication problem. Or they get rate limited. Or the python script fetches 100 records just fine, but when it needs to get 1,000,000, everything unravels. Or worse, they get all the data copied over, but the data in the warehouse says something totally different than the data in the source system. Then what do you do?
Suddenly, all your smart analysts start drowning in esoteric data engineering work. And they no longer have time to be feeding you and your Executive team all those dazzling insights you we’re hoping for. Every smart brand has stepped into this particular quicksand at some point in their journey.
** This is the exactly why we created Latticework Custom ETL!
Latticework Custom ETL is a battle-tested methodology - a “blueprint” - for implementing ETL pipelines fast. Generally in 30 days or less! It helps brands skip over the literally 100’s of pitfalls that our team has already experienced first hand. It helps brands avoid the common misconception that “this ETL script should just take a couple days” when in fact, it can drag an entire analytics team down for 6 months!
The Marketing Tech landscape isn’t getting any smaller - at the last count in 2020, there were over 8,000 Marketing Tech SaaS platforms to reckon with. Each with their own API, schemas, and idiosyncrasies. But with out Latticework Custom ETL methodology, we work directly with your team to vet your mission-critical SaaS system top-to-bottom. We identify the risks, the hidden complexities, and we ask all the hard questions that most folks don’t even know to ask. We draw up a custom plan to get all your historical data - and all of the new data that’s created each and every day - from your SaaS system into your data warehouse. We save you literally hundreds of hours of time, 10’s of thousands of dollars in resources, and get your team back to where you wanted to be all along: Out of the trenches, and back feeding dazzling insights to you and your Executive teams.
With Latticework Custom ETL, our team focuses on the infinite esoteric details of building ETL pipelines, so your team can just focus on the Analytics. We’ll handle the heavy lifting of things like:
API Quality & API “Risk” - We vet whether the API you’re intending to use can actually do the things you expect it to do, since so many brands are blind-sided to learn that their API’s have unanticipated nuances to them.
API Authentication & Rate Limiting - We figure out whether the API has a simple or weird way of authenticating, and how to work around rate limits.
Historical Data Loading - We perform the generally massive historical data loads that need to take place before an ETL pipeline goes live.
Incremental Daily Data Loading - We configure the ETL pipeline to grab any new, updated, or deleted data on a regular basis.
ETL Starts & Restarts - We ensure the API supports “primary keys” or “cursors” so that the pipeline knows where how to restart where it left off the last time it ran, regardless of errors or hiccups.
Big Data Quality Assurance - We craft a custom plan to ensure that the “source” and “destination” data sets says the same things, since there’s often variations between the two, and QA’ing billion record Big Data sets isn’t possible using traditional testing.
At Latticework, we’ve spent the last 5 years coaching over 60 brands how to get value out of their data. Things like extracting data out of esoteric data platforms and API’s. Like taming temperamental ETL pipelines, handling data validation errors, and ensuring uptime. And by empowering analytics teams to get the data they need in an automated fashion without drowning in manual data tasks.
Only after brands are able to tackle these unwieldy and skill-intensive ETL pipelines are they able to go back to the job of generating insights for your team and back to focusing on the growth of their business. We have packages for each stage of a brand’s growth: From Lite, to Basic, to Advanced, to working with an always-on marketing analytics Agency.
So if you want to avoid getting entangled in a gnarly web of custom ETL pipelines, and would like to try the Latticework Custom ETL service, click the link below to book a free consultation.
And we’ll have you and your brand up and running fast!