Access your data on Freshdesk

The first step in loading Freshdesk data to any kind of data warehouse solution is to access them and start extracting it.

Freshdesk offers a rich and well-defined API that belongs to the Representational State Transfer (REST) category. Using it you can perform RESTful operations such as reading, modifying, adding, and deleting of your helpdesk data, thus allowing you to programmatically interact with your account.

Among the 18 provided resources, you can find information about Tickets and Conversations, Agents, Companies, Surveys and Satisfaction Ratings, and many more.

In addition to the above, the things that you have to keep in mind when dealing with the Freshdesk API, are:

• Rate limits. Depending on the chosen plan and API version being used, Freshdesk allows a number of API calls per hour.
• Authentication. You authenticate on Freshdesk using an API key.
• Paging and dealing with big amount of data. Platforms like Freshdesk dealing with clickstream data tend to generate a lot of data, like events on your web properties.

Transform and prepare Freshdesk Data for MS SQL Server

After you have accessed data on Freshdesk, you will have to transform it based on two main factors,

1. The limitations of the database that is going to be used
2. The type of analysis that you plan to perform

Each system has specific limitations on the data types and data structures that it supports. If for example, you want to push data into Google BigQuery, you can send nested data like JSON directly.

Of course, when you are dealing with tabular data stores, like Microsoft SQL Server, this is not an option. Instead, you will have to flatten out all data, just as in the case of JSON, before loading into the database.

Also, you have to choose the right data types. Again, depending on the system you will send the data to and the data types that the API exposes to you, you will have to make the right choices. These choices are important because they can limit the expressivity of your queries and limit your analysts on what they can do directly out of the database. Freshdesk has a very limited set of available data types which means that your work to do these mappings is much easier and straightforward, but nonetheless equally important with any other case of a data source.

Due to the rich and complex data model that Freshdesk follows, some of the provided resources might have to be flattened out and be pushed in more than one table.

Load your Freshdesk data into Microsoft SQL Server

So, after you have managed to access data on Freshdesk and you have also figured out the structure that data will have on your database, you need to load any data to the database, in our case into a Microsoft SQL Server.

As a feature-rich and mature product, MS SQL Server offers a large and diverse set of methods for loading data in a database. One way of importing data into your database is by using the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard. With it and through a visual interface you will be able to bulk load data from a number of data sources that are supported.

Another way for importing bulk data into an SQL Server, both on Azure and on-premises, is by using the bcp utility. This is a command-line tool that is built specifically for bulk loading and unloading of data from an MS SQL database.

Finally and for compatibility reasons, especially if you are managing databases from different vendors, you can BULK INSERT SQL statements.

Similarly, and as it happens with the rest of the databases, you can also use the standard INSERT statements, where you will be adding data row-by-row directly to a table. It is the most basic and straightforward way of adding data in a table but it doesn’t scale very well with larger datasets.

Updating your Freshdesk data on MS SQL Server

As you will be generating more data on Freshdesk, you will need to update your older data on an MS SQL Server database. This includes new records, together with updates to older records that for any reason have been updated on Freshdesk.

You will need to periodically check Freshdesk for new data and repeat the process that has been described previously while updating your currently available data if needed. Updating an already existing row on a SQL Server table is achieved by creating UPDATE statements.

Another issue that you need to take care of is identifying and removing any duplicate records on your database. Either because Freshdesk does not have a mechanism to identify new and updated records or because of errors on your data pipelines, duplicate records might be introduced to your database.

In general, ensuring the quality of data that is inserted in your database is a big and difficult issue and MS SQL Server features like TRANSACTIONS can help tremendously, although they do not solve the problem in the general case.

The best way to load data from Freshdesk to MS SQL Server

So far, we just scraped the surface of what you can do with MS SQL Server and how to load data into it. Things can get even more complicated if you want to integrate data coming from different sources.

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