Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

April 2021

10 Tips to Help You Write a Flat File Database

Originally developed by IBM, flat file databases have been around since the 1970s. Because these files store data in plain text format, most people use MS Excel to create them. It’s an easy-to-use system that allows for the quick sorting of results. This is because each line of plain text has just one record. Tabs, commas, or other delimiters separate multiple records. In this article, you’ll learn some tips for optimizing your flat file.

How Xplenty Simplifies Heroku PostgreSQL Data Integration

What can you do with data collected on Heroku PostgreSQL? How will you analyze it and integrate it? With Xplenty, of course! Xplenty lets you connect to a PostgreSQL database on Heroku, design a Dataflow via an intuitive user interface, aggregate the data, and even save it back to PostgreSQL on Heroku or other databases and cloud storage services.

Which Cloud Database Platform to Choose for Your Applications

While a vital component of any app's stack is the database, managing a database is challenging and hard work. Not only do you need to set up, maintain, scale, and patch databases, but also you need to create strong backup policies, ensure sharding and replications. Long story short, managing a database is time-consuming and requires a dedicated and skilled team, which is why a major trend for managing databases is DBaaS, or Database as a Service.

Simplify the MongoDB ETL Process

The faster you can extract, transform, and load data from MongoDB, the better it is for your business processes and business intelligence systems. The problem is, most ETL solutions struggle to manage MongoDB’s dynamic schemas, NoSQL support, and JSON data types. That’s not the case with Xplenty – which was optimized for easy, no-fuss MongoDB integrations with ease: no custom code, no delays, no confusion.

BI Tool Integrations for Heroku Postgres

Heroku is a powerful platform for application development. Users can build and deploy on the cloud, and you can effortlessly scale up once your app takes off. And behind every app, you'll find an equally powerful database: Heroku Postgres. If you're building Heroku apps, you'll find them to be a rich source of operational and customer data. Add in the right Business Intelligence (BI) tools, and you'll be able to derive insights about the inner workings of your organization.

What is a Flat File Database?

When it comes to data storage, there is almost as much diversity in the types of databases as there is in the data that they contain. Designing and implementing a strong enterprise data strategy means that you need to be aware of the different databases and how you might best apply them within your organization. In IT, the term "flat file" means something very different from the heavy-duty steel construction file cabinets that you might buy from Safco.

Xplenty's MongoDB Connector

MongoDB is a popular non-relational (a.k.a NoSQL) database. It is document-oriented and distributed in nature. MongoDB is known to be highly scalable and flexible. In this post, we'll demonstrate how you can utilize MongoDB in your ETL pipelines with Xplenty. To start with, let us briefly discuss why and when you'd want to use MongoDB over other relational databases.