Connect Chargebee to Redshift: 2 Easy Methods

Since SaaS businesses operate at scale, they handle millions of monthly transactions. To manage huge volumes of transactions, organizations often use Chargebee, a subscription and billing management system, to streamline the process. Although Chargebee offers analytics and reporting capabilities, moving a colossal amount of data into Redshift can allow you to perform in-depth analytics. For advanced analysis, you can use Amazon Redshift ML capabilities to get insights into areas you need to improve to increase your company’s growth.

In this article, you will learn about these two technologies and how you can connect Chargebee to Redshift effectively.

Key Features of Redshift

•  Advanced Analytics: AWS Amazon supports spatial data processing by providing polymorphic data types for in-depth and advanced analyses. You can include GEOMETRY attributes to the tables and run SQL commands for spatial and non-spatial datasets. Integrating such data with your analytical queries help gain meaningful business insights.
• Scalable: Amazon Redshift can increase throughput almost 35 times or more to support unlimited concurrent users and thousands of queries virtually. With concurrency scaling, AWS Redshift manages the irregularity in workload while maintaining a constant SLA (Service-level agreement) via elastic scaling.
• Secure: Amazon Redshift is part of the AWS services that satisfy organizations’ security-sensitive demands. AWS security credentials monitor all cluster management operations and only permit IAM users to access data via APIs or the console.

Key Features of Chargebee

• Subscription Management: With Chargebee, you can easily manage the subscription lifecycle by creating, reactivating, or extending subscriptions. Handling advancements or downgrades in the subscriber billing cycle can be done anytime. Besides monitoring subscriptions, you can easily manage and personalize the trial period, extend their period or send reminder emails of the trial termination. You can also handle current subscriptions while maintaining accurate billing records.
• Revenue Recovery: Failed subscription payments cause involuntary churn, a critical issue that SaaS businesses need to handle. The intelligent dunning management of Chargebee keeps track of credit card declines, helps decrease churn rate, and retrieves lost revenue. You can reduce payment failures with automated credit card updater, personalized reminder emails, and intelligent payment retries. Chargebee provides alternative payment options for revenue assurance when customers face gateway issues.
• Report and Analysis: Chargebee provides RevenueStory, end-to-end analytics for all your subscriptions. The RevenueStory gives you access to custom reports and a role-focused dashboard that notifies you about the threshold alert. You can even schedule periodic digest emails containing the snapshot of your RevenueStroy, which will help you monitor your progress without logging into the app. Chargebee will send you reports at the end of the month, which can be utilized for sales, reversals, and other accounting purposes.

Methods to Connect Chargebee to Redshift

• Method 1: Simplify Chargebee To Redshift Connection Using Hevo
• Method 2:Using Custom Code to Move Data from Chargebee to Redshift

Method 1: Simplify Chargebee To Redshift Connection Using Hevo

Hevo provides an Automated No-code Data Pipeline that helps you move your Chargebee swiftly to Redshift. Hevo is fully-managed and completely automates the process of not only loading data from your 100+ Sources(including 40+ free sources)but also enriching the data and transforming it into an analysis-ready form without having to write a single line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.

Step 1: Configuring Chargebee as a Source

Perform the following steps to configure Chargebee as the Source in your Pipeline:

• Step 1: Configure Chargebee as the Source in your Pipeline by following the steps below:
  • Step 1.1: In the Asset Palette, select PIPELINES.
  • Step 1.2: In the Pipelines List View, click + CREATE.
  • Step 1.3: Select Chargebee on the Select Source Type page.
  • Step 1.4: Set the following in the Configure your Front Source page:
    • Pipeline Name: A name for the Pipeline that is unique and does not exceed 255 characters. 
    • Domain Name: A description of your Chargebee website. From your Chargebee URL, extract this. Your domain name would be abccompany23 if the URL was https://abccompany23.chargebee.com.
    • ChargeBee API Key: A secret value that can access your Chargebee data read-only through the v2 APIs.
    • Historical Sync Duration: The time it takes for historical data to be synced with the Destination. 3 Months is the default value.

Step 2: Configuring Amazon Redshift as a Destination

• To set up Amazon Redshift as a destination in Hevo, follow these steps:
  • Step 2.1: In the Asset Palette, select DESTINATIONS.
  • Step 2.2: In the Destinations List View, click + CREATE.
  • Step 2.3: Select Amazon Redshift from the Add Destination page.
  • Step 2.4: Set the following parameters on the Configure your Amazon Redshift Destination page:
    • Destination Name: A unique name for your Destination.
    • Database Cluster Identifier: Amazon Redshift host’s IP address or DNS.
    • Database Port: The port on which your Amazon Redshift server listens for connections. Default value: 5439
    • Database User: A user with a non-administrative role in the Redshift database.
    • Database Password: The password of the user.
    • Database Name: The name of the destination database where data will be loaded.
    • Database Schema: The name of the Destination database schema. Default value: public.
  • Step 2.5: Click Test Connection to test connectivity with the Amazon Redshift warehouse.
  • Step 2.6: Once the test is successful, click SAVE DESTINATION.

Here are more reasons to try Hevo:

• Smooth Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to your schema in the desired Data Warehouse.
• Exceptional Data Transformations: Best-in-class & Native Support for Complex Data Transformation at fingertips. Code & No-code Flexibility is designed for everyone.
• Quick Setup: Hevo with its automated features, can be set up in minimal time. Moreover, with its simple and interactive UI, it is extremely easy for new customers to work on and perform operations.
• Built To Scale: As the number of sources and the volume of your data grows, Hevo scales horizontally, handling millions of records per minute with very little latency.
• Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.

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Method 2:Using Custom Code to Move Data from ChargeBee to Redshift

Chargebee is hosted on data servers across several locations with the assistance of AWS, which maintains consistent services over a large scale, ensuring a good user experience. As Chargebee and Amazon Web Services are partners, you can store Chargebee’s data into Amazon Redshift for advanced analysis. The two steps for connecting Chargebee to Redshift are exporting data from Chargebee and uploading data into Amazon Redshift.

Step 1: Exporting data from Chargebee

Chargebee collects data to analyze and track your progress, and you can export this data from your account. You can export resources like Subscriptions, Transactions, Credit Notes, Invoices, Orders placed, VIES Validation history, and Product catalog.

To export all these resources from Chargebee, follow these steps:

• Go to Settings.
• Navigate to the Import & Export Data section.
• Click on the export data button > Export as CSV.

Step 2: Uploading data into Amazon Redshift

Loading the exported data directly from Chargebee into Amazon Redshift requires integration between them, which is challenging. However, you can upload data to Redshift via Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Data Pipelines, or remote hosts. We will be using Amazon S3 buckets to load our Chargebee data into Redshift. It consists of two stages – uploading the data files into the Amazon S3 bucket and copying the data from S3 to Redshift.

1. Loading data to Amazon S3 bucket

In Amazon S3, you can store data like photos, CSV files, videos, or various documents with the help of buckets. Each user gets a quota of 100 buckets. However, you can increase your Amazon S3 bucket quota on request. 

To load data into Amazon S3, you first need to create a cluster. If you already have one, then this step is optional. Now, create a new Amazon S3 bucket, select the appropriate region and upload your data from Chargebee into the S3 bucket.

2. Copying data from the S3 bucket to Amazon Redshift

Follow the steps below to upload the Chargebee data to Amazon Redshift:

• Create a sample table

In Amazon Redshift, use the CREATE TABLE query in your SQL console to create a new sample table. Remember to provide the exact column names of the CSV file you are exporting from Chargebee in the CREATE command.

• Execute the COPY query

Run the COPY query in the SQL console to copy the Chargebee data from the Amazon S3 bucket to Redshift. Before executing this query, remember to enable the reading access in the Amazon S3 bucket. If you are loading a large compressed file, then split it equally into smaller files – after compression, the ideal file size is 1 to 125 MB.

COPY table_name [ column_list ] 
FROM data_source 
CREDENTIALS access_credentials [options]  

You can also use the INSERT query, which is time-consuming and tedious compared to the COPY query. If you are using the COPY query, do a VACUUM process at the end to check whether the sort column is defined in the sample table. 

Limitations of Manually Connecting ChargeBee to Redshift

It implements a simple configuration between Chargebee and Redshift and provides hassle-free real-time data transfer. The manual process for connecting Chargebee to Redshift can lead to data quality issues like inconsistency and data integrity problems. Hence, this process is ineffective for connecting Chargebee to Redshift when you can use a no/low code ELT tool like Hevo Data.

Conclusion

In this article, we briefed you about the features of Chargebee and Amazon Redshift. Chargebee is a billing and subscription software that helps SaaS developers monitor their progress and track their revenue flow. You can personalize reports by exporting the data to a data warehouse like Amazon Redshift. Connecting Chargebee to Redshift with Hevo Data allows you to explore your data thoroughly and find insights to boost your company’s growth.

Visit our Website to Explore Hevo

Hevo Data offers a No-code Data Pipeline that can automate your data transfer process, hence allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business like Analytics, Marketing, Customer Management, etc.

This platform allows you to transfer data from 100+ sources (including 40+ Free Sources) such as Chargebee and Cloud-based Data Warehouses like Redshift. It will provide you with a hassle-free experience and make your work life much easier.

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Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.