Oracle Bronto is an ecommerce email marketing platform. It integrates ecommerce and point-of-sale data with operational platforms, enabling brands to maximize the value of customer data and deliver relevant, personal messages.

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.

You can use Bronto's API to get Bronto data into your data warehouse. The API was originally designed using the SOAP API protocol, but a new REST API lets you access and work with product and order data.

Bronto's API offers numerous endpoints that can provide information on orders, products, and campaigns. Using methods outlined in the API documentation, you can retrieve the data you need. For example, to get a list of all transactions for a given order object, you could GET /orders/{orderId}.

The Bronto REST API returns JSON-formatted data. Here's an example of the kind of response you might see when querying an objects endpoint.

{
    emailAddress:validly formatted email address
    contactId:string
    orderDate:ISO-8601 datetime
    status:PENDING | PROCESSED
    hasTracking:boolean
    trackingCookieName:string
    trackingCookieValue:string
    deliveryId:string
    customerOrderId:string
    discountAmount:number
    grandTotal:number
    lineItems:[
      {
        name:string
        other:string
        sku:string
        category:string
        imageUrl:string
        productUrl:string
        quantity:number
        salePrice:number
        totalPrice:number
        unitPrice:number
        description:string
        position:number
      }
    ]
    originIp:IPv4 or IPv6 address
    messageId:string
    originUserAgent:string
    shippingAmount:number
    shippingDate:ISO-8601 datetime
    shippingDetails:string
    shippingTrackingUrl:string
    subtotal:number
    taxAmount:number
    cartId:UUID
    createdDate:ISO-8601 datetime
    updatedDate:ISO-8601 datetime
    currency:ISO-4217 currency code
    states: {
      processed:boolean
      shipped:boolean
    }
    orderId:UUID
}

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.

Now what? You've built a script that pulls data from Bronto and loads it into your data warehouse, but what happens tomorrow when you have new transactions?

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, Bronto's API results include fields like createdDate 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.