How to load data from ActiveCampaign to Snowflake

Access your data on ActiveCampaign

The first step in loading your ActiveCampaign data to any kind of data warehouse solution, is to access your data and start extracting it.

ActiveCampaign has a well designed API which is structured around REST, HTTP and JSON, sufficient for interacting with the platform programmatically. API endpoint URLs are organized around resources, such as connections or deals. The available resources include the following:

1. Users
2. Deal
3. Pipelines
4. Deal Stages
5. Deal Tasks
6. Deal Task Types
7. Organizations
8. Connections
9. E-commerce Customers
10. E-commerce Orders

In addition to the above, the things that you have to keep in mind when dealing with the ActiveCampaign API, are:

1. Rate limits. There is no restriction regarding rate limits in v3 of the API which is currently on beta. However, the older version describes the rate limits as 5 requests per second per account.
2. Authentication. You can authenticate on ActiveCampaign with simple token authentication using the user’s API key in the request header.
3. Pagination. API endpoints that return a collection of items are always paginated. The number of results to display can vary with a maximum value of 100.

Transform and prepare your ActiveCampaign data for Snowflake

After you have accessed your data on ActiveCampaign, you will have to transform it based on two main factors,

1. The limitations of the database that is going to be used
2. The type of analysis that you plan to perform

Each system has specific limitations on the data types and data structures that it supports. If for example you want to push data into Google BigQuery, then you can send nested data like JSON directly.

Of course, when you are dealing with tabular data stores, like Microsoft SQL Server, this is not an option. Instead, you will have to flatten out your data, just as in the case of JSON, before loading into the database.

Also, you have to choose the right data types. Again, depending on the system that you will send the data to and the data types that the API exposes to you, you will have to make the right choices. These choices are important because they can limit the expressivity of your queries and limit your analysts on what they can do directly out of the database.

Data in Snowflake is organized around tables with a well-defined set of columns with each one having a specific data type.

Snowflake supports a rich set of data types. It is worth mentioning that a number of semi-structured data types is also supported. With Snowflake, it is possible to load data directly in JSON, Avro, ORC, Parquet, or XML format. Hierarchical data is treated as a first-class citizen, similar to what Google BigQuery offers.

There is also one notable common data type that is not supported by Snowflake. LOB or large object data type is not supported. Instead, you should use a BINARY or VARCHAR type. But these types are not that useful for data warehouse use cases.

A typical strategy for loading data from ActiveCampaign to Snowflake is to create a schema where you will map each API endpoint to a table.

Each key inside the ActiveCampaign API endpoint response should be mapped to a column of that table and you should ensure the right conversion to a Snowflake data type.

Of course, you will need to ensure that as data types from the ActiveCampaign API might change, you will adapt your database tables accordingly, there’s no such thing as automatic data type casting.

After you have a complete and well-defined data model or schema for Snowflake, you can move forward and start loading your data into the database.

Load data from ActiveCampaign to Snowflake

Usually, data is loaded into Snowflake in a bulk way, using the COPY INTO command. Files containing the data, usually in JSON format, are stored in a local file system or in Amazon S3 buckets. Then a COPY INTO command is invoked on the Snowflake instance and data is copied into the data warehouse.

The files can be pushed into Snowflake using the PUT command, into a staging environment before the COPY command is invoked.

Another alternative is to upload the data directly into a service like Amazon S3 from where Snowflake can access every data directly.

Updating your ActiveCampaign data on Snowflake

As you will be generating more data on ActiveCampaign, you will need to update your older data on Snowflake. This includes new records together with updates to older records that for any reason have been updated on ActiveCampaign.

You will need to periodically check ActiveCampaign for new data and repeat the process that has been described previously while updating your currently available data if needed. Updating an already existing row on a Snowflake table is achieved by creating UPDATE statements.

Another issue that you need to take care of is the identification and removal of any duplicate records on your database. Either because ActiveCampaign does not have a mechanism to identify new and updated records or because of errors on your data pipelines, duplicate records might be introduced to your database.

In general, ensuring the quality of data that is inserted into your database is a big and difficult issue.

The best way to load data from ActiveCampaign to Snowflake

So far we just scraped the surface of what you can do with Snowflake and how to load data into it. Things can get even more complicated if you want to integrate data coming from different sources.

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