Recently our team had the opportunity to speak with Philip Schonewille and James Whelan from Better Bathrooms, an independent bathroom retailer located in the United Kingdom. They have been using our SSIS Productivity Pack for a few months now in order to retrieve data from third-party APIs which needed to be brought into their data warehouse. They began testing our solution to build connections to platforms such as ZenDesk, eBay, and Amazon.
As anyone who has had to develop connections to an API knows, API developers have a habit of building their APIs a little bit differently from one another. Which means establishing a connection to a new API requires its own custom development. Fortunately for the Better Bathroom’s team, we have built our HTTP Connection Manager to handle the intricacies of various web service endpoints so connecting to a new API can be done quickly and easily using our GUI. Throughout their testing period when the team did hit a snag with establishing an API connection, our support team helped them through the setup process. This helped our team develop the product further by adding more features and enhancements to make it even easier to establish connections to numerous APIs.
Using HTTP Connection Manager, Better Bathrooms is able to connect to several SOAP and REST endpoints. They then use either JSON or XML Source (depending on the particular web service endpoint) to retrieve the data from the API. The chosen source component will break up the hierarchical data structure and produce column data which can be consumed by downstream SSIS pipeline components and written into their data warehouse.
You can read more about Better Bathroom’s project to connect with REST APIs using SSIS Productivity Pack in our latest case study.