When adapting your organization to be more aligned with data engineering principles, you will realize that data comes from multiple sources and formats. Integrating data from all these sources into your data warehouse is necessary to gain the full picture of what all these data present.
Data Solutions Consulting Inc. uses data ingestion tools like Fivetran to integrate data from multiple sources, especially for low-code, low-maintenance pipelines.
So, what exactly are data ingestion tools, and how does Fivetran help? Let’s find out.
Why do you need data ingestion tools?
Custom coded data ingestion of huge volumes required by modern organizations proves extremely taxing in terms of time and effort. That’s when data ingestion tools come into the picture. These tools can fetch data from all your sources, integrate them well into your repository, and ensure that the data is accurate and compatible with your analytical applications.
Using data ingestion tools lets you automate the data integration tasks, set up multiple connectors for different sources, and ensure uniform data to help maximize your business intelligence.
Why should you choose Fivetran?
A tool like Fivetran not only provides plain data integration. It provides all the necessary features to take care of the secondary functionalities like proper data transformation, maintaining data integrity, quality assurance, adherence to compliance, and more. It provides a complete data framework that helps you handle all relevant data ingestion tasks, saving time and improving your analytical capabilities.
Fivetran addresses all the common challenges faced by data ingestion in general, such as:
Maintaining data quality and integrity
When you perform automated data ingestion, there is a good chance that the extracted data gets corrupted during the process. Failed or interrupted data pipeline processes can also lead to duplicate data, incomplete data, and an overall loss of data quality. Fivetran helps overcome these issues by providing excellent idempotency.
Idempotence is the quality of a data ingestion tool to help you take care of failed synchronizations. Fivetran automatically replays data that could have been lost or corrupted in case of a failure and ensures that your repository’s data is always accurate and up to date. It also ensures that there are no duplicate records.
Fivetran also uses live updating, in which data is accurately copied to the destination as and when the source data changes.
Data integration performance
As the number of sources you work with increases, it could place a load on your data ingestion tool and affect its performance. Processes may take longer to execute, or you could face frequent failures. Fivetran deals with performance issues in an intuitive manner.
It uses a combination of algorithmic optimization, buffering, parallelization, and pipelining to reduce performance bottlenecks.
Fivetran also uses incremental updates through Change Data Capture (CDC) to minimize the load on data extraction jobs. Instead of loading the entire data all at once for every update, incremental updates help detect and update only the records that have been modified.
Real-time ingestion
Real-time ingestion is highly resource-intensive and requires optimized data extraction techniques. Fivetran allows you to execute an optimized workflow that lets you take full advantage of the benefits of real-time data ingestion.
Ease of use
There are usually three approaches to handling data ingestion:
You can choose to hand-code a data ingestion pipeline and execute it each time you need to collect data from a source. Needless to say, this method can be highly time-consuming and requires a great deal of coding and data engineering expertise.
The next approach is to use a single-purpose tool to help you build a straightforward data ingestion specifically built for one purpose. These tools have limited features and would not be suitable when you are dealing with a varied range of data sources.
The final approach is to use a data integration platform with in-built options to support various data connectors and a complete feature set to carry out all your related data pipeline tasks. Fivetran presents such a complete solution, making it suitable for all kinds of organizations and purposes. It is a fully managed data integration platform with over 300 pre-built data connectors you can use readily. You don’t have to worry about maintaining or updating the tool, as the platform takes care of it. It requires little to no coding expertise and presents an easy-to-use interface and powerful features to make your data integration projects efficient. It also allows for extensibility features so that you can build custom connectors.
However, if some custom functionality or a custom connector is needed, Data Solutions Consulting Inc. recommends using Fivetran to integrate your custom Python scripts to achieve the required functionality. We will talk about it in our next post. (Stay tuned!)
Security and compliance
When dealing with data, you must take care of security and compliance. It is mandatory to ensure you adhere to data governance standards throughout every stage of the ETL process. Fievtran provides advanced security features to protect your data and ensures data compliance at all levels of data processing.
In terms of platform security, Fivetran provides sufficient security with the help of a secure network, security compliance certifications, end-to-end data encryption, process isolation, flexible deployment, and more.
Flexible pricing structure
Fivetrain presents a flexible pricing structure where you only pay for what you use. Your monthly pay will depend on the monthly active rows (MAR), representing the actual monthly data updates and not the total number of rows.
Most small to mid companies shy away from using fully managed data integration platforms given their expensive subscription starting prices once their short free trial expires.
But the best part about using Fivetran is that you can use it for free forever if your data volumes do not exceed a set threshold. And you can scale up as per your need and pay according to your actual usage. And as your data volumes go up, the prices don’t add up as much as you might expect.
Fivetran reduces the cost per row automatically as your usage volume goes up. Thus, the more data you sync, the less it will cost for each unit.
In a Nutshell
In conclusion, data ingestion pipelines play a pivotal role in modern data-driven organizations, ensuring seamless integration of data from diverse sources into a centralized repository.
Fivetran emerges as an exceptional choice, offering comprehensive solutions that address data quality, performance, real-time ingestion, ease of use, security, and flexible pricing.
With Fivetran, Data Solutions Consulting Inc. enables businesses to streamline their data integration efforts efficiently and cost-effectively, setting the stage for robust business intelligence and analytics.
Contact us today to learn more and to set up your data ingestion pipeline. We will see you in the next post, wherein we will talk about using custom scripts for customized data ingestion needs.
Comments