Article

Airbyte Use Cases: Revolutionizing ETL and Data Migration

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November 7, 2024

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25 min read

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With the increasing scale and complexity of data, your organization might find it challenging to integrate data from multiple sources or migrate to cloud-based solutions. This can result in data silos where datasets become isolated within disparate systems, limiting the accessibility and availability of data for further downstream analytics.

To overcome these problems, you can utilize the ETL approach. In this process, you extract data from various sources, temporarily store it to perform complex transformations, and load the clean data into a centralized location.

Airbyte, an AI-powered data movement platform, can simplify this process for you with its pre-built connectors and easy-to-use interface. The platform easily adapts to your existing infrastructure and evolving data needs.

This article provides a detailed overview of Airbyte and explains how it is an efficient solution for data integration tasks. It also explores several Airbyte use cases and highlights its role in revolutionizing ETL and data migration.

Overview of Airbyte

Airbyte is a robust data movement tool that is optimized to help you build streamlined data pipelines to perform data migration and replication in minutes. With its library of over 400 pre-built connectors, Airbyte enables you to consolidate data from multiple sources into your preferred destination—data warehouses, data lakes, or databases.

You can utilize its no-code connector builder or low-code connector development kit (CDK) to develop custom connectors in no time. Airbyte caters to the requirements of both non-tech staff and developers, enabling them to explore data freely.

Airbyte has also introduced an AI assistant to speed up the process of building new connectors and configuring the existing ones. The assistant reads the API documentation using links and works best with REST APIs; you can also use it with GraphQL APIs.

The platform offers an interface to support all your production environments. It provides several deployment options, such as a user-friendly UI, APIs to manage multiple connections, Terraform Provider to leverage Infrastructure-as-Code, and PyAibyte for customized development. With this, Airbyte easily fits in your modern tech stacks.

Why Use Airbyte?

With the ever-growing list of data sources, you require a solution that provides flexibility, scalability, and timely access to data. Airbyte is well-suited for a wide range of data migration use cases, and here is why:

Change Data Capture: With the CDC feature, you can incrementally capture the data changes occurring at the sources and reflect them at the destination. It enables you to keep track of your data updates by reading logs and maintains data consistency. ‍
GenAI Workflow Management: Airbyte supports several vector databases, such as Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, Chroma, and Qdrant, which you can use to load semi-structured and unstructured data. This helps simplify your GenAI workflows. You can further perform RAG transformations such as chunking, embedding, and indexing on this data and streamline the output of LLM-generated content. ‍
Schema Change Management: You can configure Airbyte to detect any schema changes occurring at the source and propagate those changes to the destination. This ensures that your data syncs are accurate and your pipelines will have reduced errors. Airbyte provides you with the flexibility to refresh the schema manually at any time. Conversely, it automatically checks for schema changes every 15 minutes for cloud users and every 24 hours for self-hosted users. ‍
Long-tail Connector Coverage: Airbyte’s community of over 20K data experts has collectively created over 10k custom connectors. You can also contribute to the Airbyte Marketplace by extending Airbyte’s functionality and building custom connectors using the connector builder.

How Airbyte Facilitates Reliable Data Replication and Migration

Airbyte offers robust architecture and several advanced features that help you replicate or migrate your data safely across systems. The platform utilizes several security measures, such as role-based access controls, encryption-in-transit, and network security, to protect your data.

Some more features of Airbyte include:

Sync Modes

The sync modes in Airbyte govern how data is read from the source and written into the destination. The platform provides different sync modes to cater to diverse use cases.

By learning how these sync modes are named, you will be able to understand them better:

The first part of the name defines how the source connector reads the data. There are two ways to read records: Incremental and Full Refresh. ‍
The second part of the sync mode’s name defines how the destination connector writes the data. This includes Overwrite, Append, Overwrite Deduped, and Append Deduped.

A sync mode is a combination of source and destination modes. Here are some of the options that Airbyte UI provides:

Incremental Append: Syncs only new records and writes data in existing tables in the destination.‍
Full Refresh Append: Syncs all the records and writes data in the existing tables in the destination.‍
Full Refresh Overwrite: Syncs all the records and replaces the existing data in the destination by overwriting it.

Using sync modes, you can minimize the volume of data transferred during data migration and maintain up-to-date information at the destination. This enhances the accuracy and consistency of your data flows.

Schema Propagation

Airbyte provides the schema change management feature, enabling you to specify how the tool should handle any schema change in the source for each connection. This is done by using the DiscoverSchema operation, which automatically runs before sync. The platform then compares the current schema of your source data with the schema stored from previous replications.

There are two additional levels of schema change propagation:

Propagate Column Changes Only: With this setting, you can only propagate the changes occurring in columns. New or removed streams are ignored. ‍
Propagate All Changes: This setting helps you capture all new streams and column changes at the source and reflect them in your target database. This includes all the additions, deletions, and data type changes.

With schema propagation, you can reduce the operational load for maintaining pipelines and easily set up the replication process.

Job Scheduling

All the interactions with connectors in Airbyte are run as jobs performed by a Worker, and each job has a corresponding worker, such as:

Spec Worker: The worker that retrieves specifications (inputs) of a particular connector. ‍
Check Connection Worker: It verifies if the input is valid or not. ‍
Discovery Worker: This worker retrieves the schema of the source underlying a connector. ‍
Sync Worker: It is used to sync data between source and destination.

These workers are temporary and used for scheduling jobs.

In the event of a sync job failure, Airbyte will attempt to retry the pipeline. The number of permitted attempts per job change is based on the outcomes of previous attempts. If, even after an effort, no data is synchronized, Airbyte implements a short backoff period before starting a new attempt. This improves the chances of successful synchronization, enhancing data replication and migration reliability.

Besides this, Airbyte offers a next-generation Workload architecture that decouples the number of running jobs and the jobs that can be started. The jobs stay in the queue until resources are available, ensuring system resources are utilized efficiently.

Notification and Alerting

You can set up notifications in your Airbyte workspace to stay up-to-date about your integration activities. Airbyte provides you with the following notification options:

Failed Sync: When a sync fails from any of your connections. ‍
Automated Connection Updates: This can be useful for getting updates for schema changes in the source data. ‍
Warning: A connection will be turned off soon after repeated failure. For Airbyte Cloud, the warning notification alters when the new connector version is available and requires a manual update.

Using PyAirbyte for Efficient ETL Operations

Airbyte offers PyAirbyte, an open-source Python library that provides a set of utilities enabling you to use the Airbyte connectors in the Python environment. It helps you configure source connections with flexible data stream and caching options.

Here is how you can utilize PyAirbyte to build data pipelines for data movement:

First, you need to install PyAirbyte using pip install.


%pip install --quiet airbyte

The next step is to extract the source data. To do this, you need to set up a source connection. Create and configure an Airbyte source connector using the following commands:

Create a source connector


import airbyte as ab
source: ab.Source = ab.get_source("source-faker")

Source faker generates sample data for you using the Python mimesis package.

After implementing the step above, configure the source and check the connection. You can do this by using the following code:


source.set_config(
    config={
        "count": 50_000,  # Adjust this to get a larger or smaller dataset
        "seed": 123,
    },
)

Verify the config and creds by running `check`


source.check()

Once the connection is established, you can read data from the PyAirbyte cache. To do this, you can use the following code:


source.select_all_streams()
read_result: ab.ReadResult = source.read()

The caches in PyAirbyte are SQL caches, which you can convert into Panda DataFrame to work with source data in the Python environment.

You can now perform transformations on the source data in Python. Python supports libraries like Pandas and SQL tools, which can help remove error values, align date-time values, or create embeddings for vector databases.

Once the data is transformed and visualized, you can load the data into a destination to create a centralized repository.

Advantages of Using PyAirbyte:

It enables rapid prototyping and minimizes ETL coding.
The use of Python simplifies integration into existing workflows.
It enables quick setup and iteration of data pipelines.
Reduces the need for custom ETL development as it provides the facility to utilize pre-built connectors.
Enhances collaboration and reliability through version control and CI/CD practices.

Airbyte Use Cases

With Airbyte, almost 7000+ companies are syncing their data on a daily basis. Here are some Airbyte use cases highlighting how it helps streamline ETL and ELT data operations:

Documentation Error Identification

Airbyte enables you to build ETL pipelines using PyAirbyte and allows you to integrate it with popular LLM frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex. You can leverage this setup to analyze and identify errors within your code documentation using a Q and A application.

Use Case: End-to-end RAG using GitHub, PyAirbyte, and LangChain

Let’s explore how you can use the PyAirbyte library to read data from GitHub and transform it for RAG.

The prerequisite for this use case is a GitHub personal access token and an OpenAI API key. The next step involves installing PyAirbyte and LangCahin modules. Once installed, you can extract the GitHub records and transform them into documents using PyAirbyte’s to_documents() method.

Then, depending on the scale of your data, you can choose to set render_metadata=True if you are working with smaller databases. This publishes metadata to the markdown file along with the documents. However, it is less helpful for extensive datasets.

The LangChain library is then used to split these documents into manageable chunks, making it easier to load them into a vector store. At this point, you should ensure that you have added the OPENAI_API_KEY to the secrets tab. The last step involves setting up the RAG application using LangChain.

Using LangChain’s retriever function, you can fetch relevant information, process it, and provide output based on the queries.

Marketing Analytics

Airbyte can support various processes in your marketing analytics through seamless data integration from sources like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Google Analytics 4, Apple Search Ads, and more. You can centralize your marketing data and get insights on customer engagement, ROI, click-through rates, acquisition costs, and more.

Use Case: PensionBee

PensionBee, a global leader in the consumer retirement market, offers customers a dashboard called “BeeHive.” This dashboard streamlines the process of accessing pensions anytime and from anywhere.

As pensions constantly change over time, customers need access to updated data to make critical financial decisions. With the increase in customer base and data fragmented across disparate systems, it took more work for them to manage the client profiles. They weren’t able to reach the right customer at the right time just through push notifications or email messages.

Using Airbyte, PensionBee was able to easily sync data between sources, such as CRM marketing, into a single and coherent platform. This enabled them to streamline data processing time from start to finish and have a 360 view of their customer data. By optimizing Airbyte’s data pipelines, PensionBee focuses on analyzing data to make informed decisions, saving 10% of its marketing budget.

Artificial Intelligence

Airbyte allows you to perform data integration with various vector databases, which are employed to optimize natural language processing tasks for AI and machine learning models. You can efficiently sync unstructured data into databases like Pinecone, Weaviate, and Chroma DB, enabling the processing of embeddings for applications like semantic search or recommendation systems. This streamlined integration allows AI models to handle large-scale data with improved accuracy.

Use Case: Build End-to-End RAG Application Using Airbyte and Snowflake Cortex

Large Language Models are helpful for general information, but they often need help with domain-specific knowledge. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) addresses this by feeding LLMs with current and reliable data, ensuring more accurate responses.

You can build an end-to-end RAG application using Airbyte Cloud, Google Drive, and Snowflake Cortex. The first step is to set up your data source, which is a Google Drive folder. Use a document file type format option to create a stream in Airbyte. Second step of the process is to set up the Snowflake Cortex, where you create and configure entities like a warehouse, database, and schema within a Snowflake environment. This ensures that the Cortex is ready to store and analyze your data.

The last step is to create a connection in Airbyte and migrate data from the source to the Snowflake instance. Next, you can explore and process it to build RAG using Snowflake Cortex functions. The key elements in the RAG process are to generate vector embedding from the query and perform operations like vector similarity search.

For instance, functions like VECTOR_COSINE_SIMILARITY are used to measure similarity between vector points. This helps you to retrieve matching document chunks and generate specific responses.

Conclusion

Airbyte is a scalable and flexible solution that revolutionizes your ETL and data migration processes. Its extensive connector library and features like schema propagation, change data capture, and job scheduling help you efficiently extract and load data across different platforms.

Besides this, PyAirbyte, the Airbyte Python library, simplifies ETL workflows through rapid prototyping and quick setup. These features streamline various Airbyte use cases spanning areas like finance, analytics, AI, and more, deriving informed decision-making.

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