MailChimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service that companies use to send more than a billion email messages a day.

Apache Superset is a cloud-native data exploration and visualization platform that businesses can use to create business intelligence reports and dashboards. It includes a state-of-the-art SQL IDE, and it's open source software, free of cost. The platform was originally developed at Airbnb and donated to the Apache Software Foundation.

MailChimp also offers a RESTful API for syncing campaign information and stats. To get your MailChimp data into your data warehouse, you can extract it from MailChimp's servers using the MailChimp API. To get information about a campaign with the API, for example, you could call GET /campaigns/{campaign_id}.

MailChimp generates a lot of data. Anytime you send an email or someone opens and reads one, it generates an event. Depending on your needs, you may want to use webhooks to receive streaming updates of these events as they happen. If so, you'll need to build code on your end to receive the streaming data.

The MailChimp API returns JSON-formatted data. A call to get campaign information might return data that looks like this.

{
  "id": "42694e9e57",
  "type": "regular",
  "create_time": "2018-12-15T14:40:36+00:00",
  "archive_url": "http://eepurl.com/xxxx",
  "status": "save",
  "emails_sent": 0,
  "send_time": "",
  "content_type": "template",
  "recipients": {
    "list_id": "57afe96172",
    "segment_text": ""
  },
  "settings": {
    "subject_line": "I have a watermelon farm.",
    "title": "Freddie's Jokes Vol. 1",
    "from_name": "Freddie",
    "reply_to": "freddie@freddiesjokes.com",
    "use_conversation": false,
    "to_name": "",
    "folder_id": 0,
    "authenticate": true,
    "auto_footer": false,
    "inline_css": false,
    "auto_tweet": false,
    "fb_comments": false,
    "timewarp": false,
    "template_id": 100,
    "drag_and_drop": true
  },
  "tracking": {
    "opens": true,
    "html_clicks": true,
    "text_clicks": false,
    "goal_tracking": true,
    "ecomm360": true,
    "google_analytics": true,
    "clicktale": ""
  },
  "delivery_status": {
    "enabled": false
  },
  "_links": [
    {
      "rel": "parent",
      "href": "https://usX.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/campaigns",
      "method": "GET",
      "targetSchema": "https://api.mailchimp.com/schema/3.0/Campaigns/Collection.json",
      "schema": "https://api.mailchimp.com/schema/3.0/CollectionLinks/Campaigns.json"
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "href": "https://usX.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/campaigns/42694e9e57",
      "method": "GET",
      "targetSchema": "https://api.mailchimp.com/schema/3.0/Campaigns/Instance.json"
    },
    {
      "rel": "delete",
      "href": "https://usX.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/campaigns/42694e9e57",
      "method": "DELETE"
    },
    {
      "rel": "cancel_send",
      "href": "https://usX.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/campaigns/42694e9e57/actions/cancel-send",
      "method": "POST"
    },
    {
      "rel": "feedback",
      "href": "https://usX.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/campaigns/42694e9e57/feedback",
      "method": "GET",
      "targetSchema": "https://api.mailchimp.com/schema/3.0/Campaigns/Feedback/Collection.json"
    }
  ]
}

If you don't already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you'll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you'll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them. MailChimp's documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.

Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" – some of the objects may actually be lists. In these cases you'll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.

You must replicate data from your SaaS applications to a data warehouse before you can report on it using Superset. Superset can connect to almost 30 databases and data warehouses. Once you choose a data source you want to connect to, you must specify a host name and port, database name, and username and password to get access to the data. You then specify the database schema or tables you want to work with.

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, MailChimp's API results include fields like create_time that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've take new data into account, you can set your script up as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If MailChimp modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.