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Comment by samcheng | Hacker News Reader

ETL-as-a-Service is a great idea, particularly one that is visualization/analytics-tool-agnostic!

However, there are so many data sources, and they all require different integrations with their different APIs or export mechanisms. A service isn't really useful unless it can import the lion's share of services that a given company uses...

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You’re right. There are a lot of sources out there. It’s a ton of work for companies to build out their own pipelines and learn every new API. We want to save them from that burden so that they can focus on the analysis. We’ll be adding many more connections in the coming weeks and months, and also opening up the platform for cloud services to add themselves. Stay tuned!

Eh, you'd be surprised how much value a company can get just by marrying a few data sources (e.g., marketing automation + google analytics + CRM).

Doing this right now manually piping data into PostgreSQL via Heroku and using Chartio to visualize and query.

I don't really agree. I mean, yeah, comprehensiveness is great, and it sounds like Segment is working towards it. But every integration they build is one less custom integration that your data engineers have to build.

My company (Fivetran, YC W2013) offers the same service and supports a lot more sources (https://fivetran.com/integrate), including relational databases.

We have been very happy with sources - it doesn't cover EVERY service we use (yet) but taking even just one or two out of in-house ETL is a huge benefit.

Agreed. I don't use any of those services. Seems the product integrations limits the customer pool quite a bit

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