Connect Chargebee to Snowflake: 2 Easy Methods

The global eCommerce subscription business is anticipated to reach $2.64 trillion by 2028, according to UnivDatos Market Insights. Chargebee is one such business that is helping fuel global eCommerce subscription market growth by providing an easy-to-implement platform to help companies with their recurring billing system and easy management of subscription-based SaaS businesses.

Organizations can connect Chargebee to a data warehouse and analytics platform for better insights and storage of their data. Snowflake is one such SaaS-based data warehouse that runs on top of AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to offer storage and compute services to users. 

In this blog, you will learn about Chargebee and Snowflake’s features and how to connect Chargebee to Snowflake. 

Prerequisites

• Understanding of cloud computing

What is Chargebee?

Chargebee is a subscription service that makes it easy for businesses to start a subscription-based model. Unlike a payment gateway that only offers a subscription billing feature, Chargebee goes beyond and offers a subscription management service that helps you to set up and manage subscriptions. 

Chargebee has five major products: Subscription Management, Billing Automation, Recurring payments, Accounting & Taxes, and Reporting & Analytics. It has solutions for B2B SaaS, eCommerce, Publishing, Edtech, and Video & OTT platforms.

Key Features of Chargebee

• Subscription Management: Chargebee offers various features like a flexible product catalog, subscription lifestyle management, automated add-ons, trial management, back-dated subscription actions, segmented email notifications, and trial management.
• Recurring Billing and Payment: Features like customizable billing cycles, advanced invoices, chargeback management, recurring invoices, metered billing, quotes, consolidated invoicing, and multi-device support is available under the recurring billing option.
• Checkout and Self-Service Portal: Features available are a self-service portal, returning user support, one-time checkout, seamless checkout experience, cart abandonment recovery, guest checkout, mobile checkout solutions, etc.
• Security & Compliance: Under the security and compliance section, companies get features like consent management, fraud alerts, email verification, and personal letter management. 
• Globalized Subscription: Companies can facilitate globalized subscriptions through intelligent routing, global tax profiles, e-invoice compliance, withholding TDS, etc. 
• Reports and Analytics: Chargebee also offers a report and analytics section where companies can find features like trial analytics, report builder, subscription metric, scheduled dashboard digest emails, finance-account summary report, and more to better understand their finances and customers. 

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a SaaS-based data warehouse that runs on top of public clouds such as Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. Unlike other data warehouse solutions, Snowflake utilizes an enhanced ANSI-compliant SQL engine that works solely on the cloud. It uses virtual compute instances and storage buckets, making Snowflake a highly scalable and cost-efficient solution for processing enormous amounts of big data.

Snowflake architecture is a hybrid of shared-disk and shared-nothing databases, consisting of a central repository for persistent data and compute nodes to access disk storage. It uses distributed Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) cluster nodes for executing queries. Snowflake also allows organizations to scale compute and storage independently, allowing companies to only pay for extra compute or storage resources.

Snowflake provides data storage, processing, and analytic solutions that are faster, easier to use, and more flexible than traditional options. Snowflake isn’t based on any existing database technology or “big data” software platforms like Hadoop.

With big data, Snowflake’s architecture allows for similar flexibility. Snowflake separates the storage and computes functions, so businesses that need a lot of storage but don’t need a lot of CPU cycles, or vice versa, don’t have to pay for an integrated bundle that includes both.

Snowflake has a flexible pricing structure where users can separately pay for computing and storage resources. Users can also benefit from Snowflake’s cost-effective compression to store unlimited amounts of data. You can sign up for the on-demand service for usage-based pricing models with no long-term commitment. Compute usage in Snowflake is billed on a per-second basis, with a minimum of 60 seconds.

Key Features of Snowflake

• Standard & Extended SQL Support: Snowflake is an SQL-based data warehouse that supports the specified data-defined and data manipulation language. It also provides advanced DML commands for multi-table operations such as MERGE, INSERT, and MULTI-MERGE. With Snowflake, users can create user-defined functions (UDFs) to extend functionality in both JavaScript and SQL.
• Command-Line Client (CLI): Snowflake provides SnowSQL, a Python-based CLI for connecting to the data warehouse. Users can download and install this tool separately to execute queries, including loading and unloading data.
• Rich Set of Client Connectors: With Snowflake, users get access to a wide range of connectors and drivers for connecting to the data cloud. Some of these client connectors are Python Connector, NodeJS driver, ODBC driver for C/C++ development, and JBDC driver for Java programming. 
• Web-Based Graphical User Interface (GUI): Snowflake offers a web interface for users to interact with the cloud. With the Web GUI, users can monitor resources and system usage, manage their accounts, and query data. 

Methods to Connect Chargebee to Snowflake

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

Method 1: Simplify ChargeBee To Snowflake Connection Using Hevo

Hevo provides an Automated No-code Data Pipeline that helps you move your ChargeBee swiftly to Snowflake. 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.

Using Hevo Data, you can connect ChargeBee to Snowflake in the following 2 steps:

• 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 1.5: TEST & CONTINUE is the button to click.
• Step 1.6: Set up the Destination and configure the data ingestion.
• Step 2: To set up Snowflake 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 Snowflake from the Add Destination page.
  • Step 2.4: Set the following parameters on the Configure your Snowflake Destination page:
    • Destination Name: A unique name for your Destination.
    • Snowflake Account URL: This is the account URL that you retrieved.
    • Database User: The Hevo user that you created in the database. In the Snowflake database, this user has a non-administrative role.
    • 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.
    • Warehouse: SQL queries and DML operations are performed in the Snowflake warehouse associated with your database.

• Step 2.5: Click Test Connection to test connectivity with the Snowflake 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.

Try Hevo Today!

SIGN UP HERE FOR A 14-DAY FREE TRIAL

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

Chargebee offers analytics and insight-driven dashboards, so companies can get a 360degree view of their subscriptions and customers. It allows users to track metrics like Lifetime value, MRR, Average revenue per subscriber, etc. Users can also customize reports with zero code and GAAP-proof financial analysis. However, connecting Chargebee to Snowflake will help users to perform advanced analytics to obtain insights that can provide them a unique advantage over competitors. 

In this section, you’ll see how to extract data from Chargebee and manually upload it to Snowflake:

Access and Extract Data from Chargebee

To export data from Chargebee, navigate to Settings > Import & Export Data > Export Data. You can export data for a wide list of resources:

• Invoices
• Subscriptions
• Transactions
• Credit Notes
• VIES Validation History
• Orders
• Product Catalog

You can export data such as subscriptions, customers, and plans from the resources page:

In addition, Chargebee has an API that can be used to access account data, and it’s built around 20 different resources. You can access the API over the web with HTTP. Alternatively, Chargebee also has SDKs for the most popular frameworks and languages. 

You have to consider three things while using API to extract data:

• Every API has rate limits. 
• You need an API key for authentication.
• Considering rate limits and a vast amount of data generated by Chargebee, it can be difficult to pull large amounts of data out of Chargebee API. 

You’ll have to start with creating a schema for data tables and identifying a predefined data type for each response value. Snowflake supports various types of data, along with semi-structured data. You can load data in Avro, ORC, XML, Parquet, and JSON format. While designing a schema for loading data from Chargebee to Snowflake, you’ll have to map each API endpoint to the table.

Upload Data to Snowflake

In the case of large datasets, start by compressing your data and uploading it with the COPY command or with the web interface. You can only upload up to 50 MB file sizes with the web interface wizard and will have to use SnowSQL, Snowflake client, or COPY command for larger files. 

Let’s see how to upload Chargebee data with the web interface wizard:

Step 1: Opening the Load Data Wizard

• Find Data > Databases on the Snowflake Web homepage to view the objects.

• Click on Create a table. 
• Click on the Load Data button to load data in the table. 
• The wizard will help you populate the data into the table you selected in the previous step.

Step 2: Selecting a Warehouse

• Choose a data warehouse from the drop-down button. 
• Click on Next.

Step 3: Selecting Source Files

Choose either a local machine or a cloud storage location at this stage. 

• For Loading From Your Local Machine
  • Choose the ‘Load files from your computer’ button.
  • Select the files you downloaded from Chargebee. 

• For Loading from Cloud Storage
  • Choose a cloud storage option like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Snowflake, or Microsoft Azure. 
  • Select the files and click Open.

Step 4: Selecting a File Format

• For choosing an existing named file format. 
  • Choose a preexisting file format.
  • Click next.

OR

• Create a new named file format
  • Click the (+) from the drop-down menu.
  • Fill all the details according to the format of your data files.
  • Click on the Finish button. 

Step 5: Selecting Load Options

• Specify the steps that Snowflake should take if any error occurs while copying data.
• Click the Load button. 
• The Load data wizard will upload the data and close. 
• Click Ok once data loading is complete.

Limitations of Manually Connecting ChargeBee to Snowflake

As your customer base grows, you’ll have to keep updating data on Snowflake for better insights. With the manual process discussed above, you’ll have to scan for new data in Chargebee and manually update it into Snowflake whenever you want fresh data. Another issue is that you’ll have to remove duplicate entries in your database. This is where a no-code/low-code platform is a great alternative to manually moving data from Chargebee to Snowflake. You can use Hevo Data to connect Chargebee to Snowflake to move your data quickly, get real-time access, and generate insights from your data. 

Conclusion

In this blog, you learned about the features of Chargebee and Snowflake. Chargebee holds vast amounts of valuable financial transactions and subscription management data. With Snowflake, you can easily store and analyze this data and calculate essential metrics such as Lifetime value and churn rate. Connecting Chargebee to Snowflake with a no-code/low-code platform like Hevo Data ensures that businesses get access to real-time data and analytics without writing long scripts. 

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 Snowflake. It will provide you with a hassle-free experience and make your work life much easier.

Want to take Hevo for a spin? 

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.