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Insights Direct Connect

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Insights Direct Connect allows you to plug directly into our Snowflake Data Warehouse via an encrypted ODBC connection so you can directly query your Insights data together with other sources of your choosing. While Insights' ETL process refreshes data from Serraview at a minimum of once a day (hourly for time series data), Insights Direct Connect provides a connection to your data as it currently exists in the data warehouse, including historic records, so you can access your data via live queries and know that you are consistently seeing the latest available extract.

Use this when …

  • you already have an existing BI tool.

  • you want to write your own SQL queries against your data.

  • you want to make use of the ODBC connection to power integrations with your internal systems or to populate an internal data lake where you can combine your Serraview data with other data sources.

  • you want to download unlimited numbers of rows of your data.

Prerequisite Skills

  • Understand data analysis and how to define a question.
  • Experience with BI tools such as Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Qlik, Looker, etc.
  • Ability to set up an ODBC connection.
  • Understand how to write SQL queries as the BI tools have a graphical interface for you to build your queries.
  • Experience with defining your own set of joins and aggregations starting with our Insights Unified Data Model.

Insights Direct Connect vs using Serraview’s API

We recommend you use the Insights Direct Connect to access the Snowflake Data Warehouse which is more broadly supported, accessible via common BI tools or SQL, and is super fast. This means your queries will perform speedily and will not affect the Serraview application where your business users are working.

The API can be used to access the Serraview transactional database's data directly, so may be useful for application-specific tasks, data export-import processing workflows, and troubleshooting. It is very important to know that hitting the API hard with your queries will introduce a risk of adversely affecting Serraview’s system performance for business users -- or we might say that accessing data through Direct Connect does not introduce any performance risks to the Serraview application.

Direct Connect

Most of the popular Business Intelligence (BI) tools on the market, such as Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Qlik, and Looker allow you to connect to ODBC data sources like Insights Direct Connect.

Direct Connect is only available at the Serraview Elite tier.

If you experience an issue with Direct Connect in your BI software, then search the Snowflake Community site or contact your BI vendor. When an issue occurs in a third-party tool, Eptura is unable to offer in-depth troubleshooting beyond the information in our Knowledge Center.