The T, transformation, is huge in many ways. Think of it this way: the data model is the primary UI for an analyst or any power user. It also dictates query performance.
Adding a visualization layer on top of Salesforce's schema, e.g. is not too helpful, regardless of where that data is living. You can answer trivial questions without too much difficulty, but the difficulty ramps up quickly.
The data access patterns, types of logic necessary, and end-user demands are hugely different between an OLTP and OLAP workload.
There's also potentially huge complexity in conforming dimensions across disparate source systems' data.
Master data management is another huge component that hits a lot of the ETL pipeline.
These concerns are all on top of hooking up the right ends of the hose to one another.
I don't mean to disparage the product or company and hope I don't come across as if I am. I just want to point out that they address only a small component of a large process, which in turn is only a segment of the BI lifecycle.
We at Looker (disclosure: work there), are totally focused on making the transformations fast, flexible and powerful. But without the data to transform, there's nothing we can do to help customers. So we're super psyched that Segment is stepping in to fill this void and get the E and L done, so we can T.
This product release is in close partnership with our BI partners (Looker, Mode, Wagon, Periscope, BIME and Chartio). One of the biggest problems our mutual customers face is getting data into their warehouse so that they can use the BI tool in the first place. This launch significantly expands the possible audience for them.
Even better, all of our BI partners built out-of-the-box reporting and dashboards based on Segment's schemas for these new third party sources. So our mutual customers can get set up even faster.
There are other ways to load in Salesforce, Zendesk, or Stripe data. It is certainly nice to be able to do that all with Segment -- but it is not necessary. Sources is nice to have, but the core warehouse service is not really complete (for us, and I suspect others too) until you can seamlessly support data backfill at all price tiers. A one-time fee for backfill fee would be okay, but saying "no we don't support that" makes me sad.
So, instead of Total Company Sales this Month, I want Bob's Sales, Joe's Sales, etc. It feels like this is just a filter on top of what you already have. Almost like a parameterized query? (pass in @UserId for a where statement)
I originally thought maybe this is the job for one of your visualization partners but you really need to filter the results before you perform the aggregate.
I can't tell you how many potential customers are crazily excited about the idea of centralizing the data that all their apps produce into one central warehouse and putting Looker on top of that, but are stymied by the middle step of actually getting the data OUT of the vendors' APIs and IN to their own warehouse. Being able to point them to an off-the-shelf solution for that problem is a big win for us.
However, there are so many data sources, and they all require different integrations with their different APIs or export mechanisms. A service isn't really useful unless it can import the lion's share of services that a given company uses...
Doing this right now manually piping data into PostgreSQL via Heroku and using Chartio to visualize and query.
Or does Segment provide a way to completely clone entire SF tables such as Opportunities & Cases and then create the aggregate queries later in segment?
In Salesforce's case, we issue bulk queries to pull the complete collection on the first run, then modify the queries thereafter to request only data that's changed since the last run.
We don't do any aggregation of the data. We load it into a data warehouse (redshift or postgres) in its complete, raw form so that you can use SQL to aggregate/join to your heart's content. Here's an example: https://help.segment.com/hc/en-us/articles/208215583-Salesfo...
I set it up with the developer account, but when I try to connect the integration, it says it's not available for the developer plan. I was like "ok, fine, i'll pay 50 bucks to try it" but then it says salesforce is only available on the Growth plan, which is $449.
Closed the tab, and moved on with my life.
if you think that's a lot you haven't seen big orgs with a shit ton of integrations and custom stuff on top of them.
