Fivetran is a cloud-based ELT platform that makes centralizing data from any sources to any warehouses effortlessly. More than the data integration, it makes sure to provide us trustworthy, cleaner, accurate and timely data. It offers so many data source connectors that deploy in minutes, requires zero maintenance, and automatically adjust to source changes. By this our data team can stop worrying about ELT engineering and focus more on driving insights.

In this blog, we will discuss some of the features of Fivetran that actually make the application more special in the process of data replication.

Simple and Reliable

Implementing Fivetran is very straightforward. Once it is turned on, we will be surprised to see how quickly our data is in the warehouse.

It’s simple interface and very strong data pipelines make us concentrate more on the analytics part rather than customizing the application. Since the data pipelines are continuously battle-tested and monitored by Fivetran, no more workforce required from our side to maintain the architecture.

Centralizing Data

Fivetran provides connectors for more than 130 data sources which are a wide range of connectivity option and it makes Fivetran integrate disparate data sources including Applications, Databases, Files, Events, Warehouses and Functions. Thus, by centralizing the data, Fivetran greatly saves the engineering costs and time for us.

Normalizing and Maintaining Schemas

Fivetran can transform and normalize the schemas even from denormalized APIs so that we can use our data immediately. With any schema or API changes in the source system, there is no need to be afraid of the potential break down of the system or no burden to re-configure the entire setup. Because Fivetran connectors can automatically adapt to these schema and API changes so that it will not disrupt our analytics.

Automatic handling of schema determination during initial connector set-up and schema maintenance for on-going source changes are the key features of Fivetran.

Incremental Updates

Reloading full data dumps from APIs and databases is a tedious one, instead, Fivetran does incremental updates on all our databases.

It means, Fivetran initially extracts the historical data from the sources, and from there, it can incrementally batch-update the tables for a minimum of every 5 minutes. So our insights update data at whatever interval that we choose and we can focus much more on sharing insights with the Business instead of ensuring that we are getting the correct data.

Log Based Replication

It is the closest approach offered by Fivetran to get real-time updates into our data warehouse by keeping the databases in sync with it.

That is, by reading database changelogs, data is updated with every version of each change. It includes tables without last modified dates and even it captures deleted information. This approach helps Business to perform advanced analytics without impacting its one going operations since it involves reading directly from the log files and even the amount of data used in the process is extremely small.

Moreover, since Fivetran is cloud-native, there is no need to direct the data through an on-premises system to get it to a warehouse. As a cloud-native application, it also poses many advantages like faster, more scalable, reliable, and ease of management.

Data Transformation

Fivetran transformations feature has been great for performing data cleansing. It is used to execute SQL transformations to improve database efficiency while running queries. It can be fired off either based on the selected interval or when the data is updated and that has proven to be a much more scalable replication process.

Real-time Monitoring

Fivetran has a clear view of sync history, progress, delays and updates for every data sync that happens. Therefore, we can get real-time feedback on every sync to understand the state of our data replication process.

Alerts

With the help of Alerts in Fivetran, we will be the first one to know if any delays happen in the process. Alerts capture the problems associated with data integration, transformation and even with the data present at the source. By enabling respective notification, Fivetran immediately notifies us through e-mail about the failure so that we can begin the troubleshooting.

Granular system logs

We will be sent granular logs to our logging system for every sync that happens. It will be more helpful to track the non-transparent systems.

Operations performed on each connector are written by Fivetran as structured log events in standardized JSON format. Fivetran will write logs to the logging service that we specify in its dashboard and the log provides a detailed view of the operations happening on each of our connectors.

Fully Transparent and Responsive

Fivetran offers us a transparent system and the team is quick to respond and they provide us 24*7 technical support so if things go wrong, they will be available to assist us promptly. The level of support and the commitment from Fivetran is critical in the decision to become and remain, a Fivetran customer.

As an ELT, Fivetran offers us more and more benefits than we discussed here. It is one of the robust tools on the market that can ensure us accurate and up-to-date data.

In addition to the higher quality and quantity of data, we can benefit from Fivetran by establishing a single source of truth to get a more complete picture of our Business. People in different geo-locations might not have the exposure to Fivetran but after using it, they will fall in love with it.

Read more blogs from Fivetran category here and know more about Visual BI’s Self Service BI offering here.