Selligent is a B2C omnichannel marketing automation platform.

Google BigQuery is a data warehouse that delivers super-fast results from SQL queries, which it accomplishes using a powerful engine dubbed Dremel. With BigQuery, there's no spinning up (and down) clusters of machines as you work with your data. With that said, it's clear why some claim that BigQuery prioritizes querying over administration. It's super fast, and that's the reason why most folks use it.

Selligent exposes data on programs, transactional mailings, and data sources via an API. We weren't able to find any online documentation on using Selligent's API, so you'll have to work closely with the company to create code to access your data.

Google Cloud Platform offers a helpful guide you can follow to begin loading data into BigQuery. Use the bq command-line tool, and in particular the bq load command, to upload files to your datasets. The syntax is documented in the Quickstart guide for bq. You can supply the table or partition schema, or, for supported data formats, you can use schema auto-detection. Iterate through this process as many times as it takes to load all of your tables into BigQuery.

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Selligent.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Selligent modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.

BigQuery is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, or Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax, or Panoply, which works with Redshift instances. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3 or Delta Lake on Databricks. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Panoply, To Azure Synapse Analytics, To S3, and To Delta Lake.