How to load data from Hubspot to SQL Data Warehouse

Extract your data from Hubspot

The Hubspot APIs are following the REST architecture that can be accessed through HTTP. As a RESTful API, interacting with it can be achieved by using tools like CURL or Postman or Apirise or by using http clients for your favorite language or framework.

A few suggestions:

Responses of the API are all in JSON, including errors although HTTP codes are also returned to indicate errors. Hubspot maintains some official SDKs for their APIs, like the hapipy client for python, also unofficial clients can be found.

Hubspot API Authentication

The Hubspot API allows two types of authentication. OAuth and API keys. Hubspot encourages the use of oAuth for any serious integration and suggests using basic authentication with API keys only for testing and rapid prototyping purposes.

Hubspot API rate limiting

The HubSpot public endpoints are powered by the same underlying technology that powers the core HubSpot application. As a result, HubSpot engineering closely monitors the usage of the public APIs to ensure a quality experience for users of the HubSpot application.

Below, you’ll find the limits by which a single integration (as identified by an access token) can consume the HubSpot public APIs.

  • Integrations cannot consume the HubSpot API at a rate greater than 10 requests/second.
  • Polling of HubSpot APIs should occur at intervals of 5 minutes or more.
  • Total requests to the HubSpot APIs should not exceed 10,000 in a 24 hour period.
  • Failed requests to the HubSpot APIs may not exceed 5% of total syncs.
  • All data passed to HubSpot must be properly encoded, and use application/json formatting.
  • Integrations should use HubSpot’s OAuth protocol.
  • Integrators must store time-to-live (TTL) data for OAuth access tokens as well as refresh tokens. Unauthorized (401) requests are not a valid indicator that a new access token must be retrieved.
  • Integrators should use their own public and documented APIs when working with the HubSpot APIs.

We reserve the right to change or deprecate the APIs over time – we will provide developers ample notification in those cases.

Endpoints and available Resources

The Hubspot API is actually a collection of a large number of APIs. Something that makes sense if we consider that Hubspot is actually more than one product and each one of these products is quite complex on its own. The APIs are the following:

  • Calendar API. Anything that has to do with calendars in Hubspot and their possible operations.
  • Companies APIs. When we talk about business and customers we talk about companies, so here is your API for interacting with companies.
  • Companies properties APIs. Companies are important for Hubspot and there’s a lot of functionality around them so there’s an auxiliary API just for working with properties of companies.
  • Contacts APIs. Contacts are the fundamental building block to HubSpot – they store lead-specific data that makes it possible to leverage much of the functionality in HubSpot, from marketing automation, to lead scoring to smart content.
  • Contact Lists APIs. API for managing the lists of your contacts.
  • Contact properties APIs. Similar to companies, this API allows you to interact with the properties of your contacts.
  • COS Blog API. Interact with Blogs throughs the Hubspot platform.
  • COS Blog Authors API. API for interacting with the authors of your blogs.
  • COS Blog Comments API. Exposes functionality related to the comments of your APIs.
  • COS Blog Posts API. Anything related to the posts of your Blog.
  • COS Blog Topics API. Manage the topics of your Blog.
  • COS Domains API. Manage your Domains through this API.
  • COS Files API. Operations related to file management inside Hubspot.
  • COS Layouts API. Manage the layouts of your pages through this API.
  • COS Page Publishing API. Operations related to publishing content through the Hubspot platform.
  • COS Sitemaps API. Operations related to the management of sitemaps for the sites you create through the Hubspot platform.
  • COS Templates API. API for managing the templates of your sites.
  • COS URL Mappings API. Operations related to URL mappings for the sites inside Hubspot.
  • Deals API. Anything that has to do with deals inside your CRM.
  • Deal Pipelines API. Manage the sales pipelines through this API.
  • Deals Properties API. Again, manage the properties of your deals.
  • Email API. Anything related to emailing from within the Hubspot platform.
  • Email Events API. Track and interact with events that happen inside emails.
  • Engagements API. Anything related to customer engagement inside the HubSpot platform.
  • Events API. Event handling for Hubspot.
  • Forms API. Manage custom forms that you create inside the platform.
  • Keywords API. Operations related to keywords for SEO.
  • Owners API. Anything related to the Owner.
  • Social Media API. API for interacting with Social media through the Hubspot platform.
  • Transactional Email API. The transactional email functionality of Hubspot.
  • Workflows API. Define and manage sales and marketing workflows.

From all the above endpoints we can pull data out of the platform, so it is easy to understand the richness of the data we can get from Hubspot. Let’s assume, as an example, that we want to get all the Deals data. By executing a GET request like this GET /deals/v1/deal/recent/modified we can get all the recently modified deals. The parameters that we can pass to the call are the following:

  • count: for specifying the number of results per page of the response.
  • offset: for paginating through all available results.
  • since: a timestamp for defining from which exact time you would like to fetch data from.

As we said earlier, results from the Hubspot API are always in JSON, so if we successfully execute the above query we’ll get the following results back:

JAVASCRIPT
{
   "results": [
       {
           "portalId": 62515,
           "dealId": 1030663,
           "isDeleted": false,
           "associations": {
               "associatedVids": [
                   27316
               ],
               "associatedCompanyIds": [
 
               ],
               "associatedDealIds": [
 
               ]
           },
           "properties": {
               "dealstage": {
                   "value": "closedwon",
                   "timestamp": 1417686612442,
                   "source": "API",
                   "sourceId": null,

The API offers you the opportunity to get very granular data about your accounting activities and use it for analytic and reporting purposes.

Load Data from Hubspot to SQL Data Warehouse

SQL Data Warehouse support numerous options for loading data, such as:

  • PolyBase
  • Azure Data Factory
  • BCP command-line utility
  • SQL Server integration services

As we are interested in loading data from online services by using their exposed HTTP APIs, we are not going to consider the usage of BCP command-line utility or SQL server integration in this guide. We’ll consider the case of loading our data as Azure storage Blobs and then use PolyBase to load the data into SQL Data Warehouse.

Accessing these services happens through HTTP APIs. APIs play an important role in both the extraction but also the loading of data into our data warehouse. You can access these APIs by using a tool like CURL or Postman. Or use the libraries provided by Microsoft for your favorite language. Before you actually upload any data you have to create a container which is something similar as a concept to the Amazon AWS Bucket, creating a container is a straightforward operation and you can do it by following the instructions found on the Blog storage documentation from Microsoft. As an example, the following code can create a container in Node.js.

JAVASCRIPT
blobSvc.createContainerIfNotExists('mycontainer', function(error, result, response){
 if(!error){
  // Container exists and allows
  // anonymous read access to blob
  // content and metadata within this container
 }
});

After the creation of the container you can start uploading data to it by using again the given SDK of your choice in a similar fashion:

JAVASCRIPT
blobSvc.createBlockBlobFromLocalFile('mycontainer', 'myblob', 'test.txt', function(error, result, response){
 if(!error){
  // file uploaded
 }
});

When you are done putting your data into Azure Blobs you are ready to load it into SQL Data Warehouse using PolyBase. To do that you should follow the directions in the Load with PolyBase documentation. In summary, the required steps to do it, are the following:

  • create a database master key
  • create a database scoped credentials
  • create an external file format
  • create an external data source

PolyBase’s ability to transparently parallelize loads from Azure Blob Storage will make it the fastest tool for loading data. After configuring PolyBase, you can load data directly into your SQL Data Warehouse by simply creating an external table that points to your data in storage and then mapping it to a new table within SQL Data Warehouse.

Of course, you will need to establish a recurrent process that will extract any newly created data from your service, load them in the form of Azure Blobs and initiate the PolyBase process for importing the data again into SQL Data Warehouse. One way of doing this is by using the Azure Data Factory service. In case you would like to follow this path, you can read some good documentation on how to move data to and from Azure SQL Warehouse using Azure Data Factory.

The best way to load data from Hubspot to SQL Data Warehouse and possible alternatives

So far, we just scraped the surface of what can be done with Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse and how to load data into it. The way to proceed relies heavily on the data you want to load, from which service they are coming from, and the requirements of your use case. Things can get even more complicated if you want to integrate data coming from different sources. A possible alternative, instead of writing, hosting, and maintaining a flexible data infrastructure, is to use a product like RudderStack that can handle this kind of problem automatically for you.

RudderStack integrates with multiple sources or services like databases, CRM, email campaigns, analytics, and more.

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