Introduction to Fivetran
Fivetran is a robust data integration platform designed to streamline the process of moving data from various sources to destination warehouses, ensuring data accuracy, reliability, and up-to-date consistency. Here’s an overview of what Fivetran does and its key features:
What Fivetran Does
Fivetran is built to manage data delivery from a wide range of sources, including enterprise technologies, cloud and on-premise databases, and popular SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics. The platform automates the data integration process, creating and maintaining a perfect replica of your data with minimal user intervention.
Key Features and Functionality
Simplified Source Integration
Fivetran boasts over 200 pre-built connectors that support data ingestion from various sources, including on-prem, cloud, and application data sources. This includes agent-based connections to legacy systems like IBM’s DB2, SAP, and Oracle, thanks to its acquisition of HVR in 2022.
Automation and Reliability
The platform is automated, resilient, and cloud-native. It ensures 99.9% uptime, allowing it to grow alongside your platform and data with minimal effort. Fivetran’s core architecture enables it to recover from any point of failure without user intervention, a significant differentiator in the data integration market.
Data Normalization and Schema Management
Fivetran automatically normalizes denormalized data sources, such as JSON objects, into structured table formats. It also generates and maintains entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs) for most application connectors, which are updated as source APIs evolve. Additionally, Fivetran performs automatic schema migration, adjusting the destination schema to reflect changes in the source data.
Incremental Updates and History Mode
The platform supports incremental batch updates, inserting, updating, and soft-deleting records in the destination warehouse based on changes at the source. Fivetran also offers a “History Mode” feature, which implements type 2 slowly changing dimensions and creates history tables automatically, particularly useful for tracking changes over time.
Cost Optimization
Fivetran’s pricing model is based on the number of monthly active rows (MAR), meaning you only pay for the unique primary keys that are changed each month. This model reduces costs, especially for transactional data where records change frequently.
Security and Compliance
Fivetran prioritizes security and compliance, holding key certifications such as CCPA, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO, PCI, and SOC2. The platform offers enterprise-ready features including Single-Sign-On (SSO), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), API key rotation policies, private cloud connectivity, and audit logging. Fivetran also supports self-hosted deployments through its Local Data Processing feature, ensuring sensitive data remains within the organization’s network.
Flexibility and Portability
Users can easily switch between different data warehouse technologies and popular open-source lake formats like Apache Iceberg. This flexibility ensures that your data integration solution can adapt to evolving business needs without deep lock-in to a particular technology or platform.
Conclusion
In summary, Fivetran is a powerful data integration tool that simplifies the process of moving data from diverse sources to modern analytics platforms, ensuring reliability, automation, and compliance while offering flexible and cost-effective solutions.