Close provides an inside sales SaaS and CRM platform that bundles calling, SMS, and email in a single platform. Users can make and receive calls and take business notes without getting on a phone or leaving the application. The software provides a single automated sales workflow system.

Panoply is a fully managed data warehouse service that can spin up an Amazon Redshift instance in just a few clicks. It uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to learn, model, and automate standard data management activities from source to analysis. It can import data with no schema, no modeling, and no configuration. With Panoply, you can use your favorite analysis, SQL, and visualization tools just as you would if you were creating a Redshift data warehouse on your own.

You can use Close's REST API to get data about contacts, leads, opportunities, and many more objects into your data warehouse. For example, to get a lead, you could GET /lead/{id}/.

Here's an example of the kind of response you might see when querying a lead.

{
    "status_id": "stat_1ZdiZqcSIkoGVnNOyxiEY58eTGQmFNG3LPlEVQ4V7Nk",
    "status_label": "Potential",
    "tasks": [],
    "display_name": "Wayne Enterprises (Sample Lead)",
    "addresses": [],
    "name": "Wayne Enterprises (Sample Lead)",
    "contacts": [
        {
            "name": "Bruce Wayne",
            "title": "The Dark Knight",
            "date_updated": "2019-01-06T20:53:01.954000+00:00",
            "phones": [
                {
                    "phone": "+16503334444",
                    "phone_formatted": "+1 650-333-4444",
                    "type": "office"
                }
            ],
            "created_by": null,
            "id": "cont_o0kP3Nqyq0wxr5DLWIEm8mVr6ZpI0AhonKLDG0V5Qjh",
            "organization_id": "orga_bwwWG475zqWiQGur0thQshwVXo8rIYecQHDWFanqhen",
            "date_created": "2019-01-01T00:54:51.331000+00:00",
            "emails": [
                {
                    "type": "office",
                    "email_lower": "thedarkknight@close.io",
                    "email": "thedarkknight@close.io"
                }
            ],
            "updated_by": "user_04EJPREurd0b3KDozVFqXSRbt2uBjw3QfeYa7ZaGTwI"
        }
    ],
    "custom.lcf_ORxgoOQ5YH1p7lDQzFJ88b4z0j7PLLTRaG66m8bmcKv": "Website contact form",
    "date_updated": "2019-01-06T20:53:01.977000+00:00",
    "html_url": "https://app.close.io/lead/lead_IIDHIStmFcFQZZP0BRe99V1MCoXWz2PGCm6EDmR9v2O/",
    "created_by": null,
    "organization_id": "orga_bwwWG475zqWiQGur0thQshwVXo8rIYecQHDWFanqhen",
    "url": null,
    "opportunities": [
        {
            "status_id": "stat_4ZdiZqcSIkoGVnNOyxiEY58eTGQmFNG3LPlEVQ4V7Nk",
            "status_label": "Active",
            "status_type": "active",
            "date_won": null,
            "confidence": 75,
            "user_id": "user_scOgjLAQD6aBSJYBVhIeNr6FJDp8iDTug8Mv6VqYoFn",
            "contact_id": null,
            "updated_by": null,
            "date_updated": "2019-01-01T00:54:51.337000+00:00",
            "value_period": "one_time",
            "created_by": null,
            "note": "Bruce needs new software for the Bat Cave.",
            "value": 50000,
            "value_formatted": "$500",
            "value_currency": "USD",
            "lead_name": "Wayne Enterprises (Sample Lead)",
            "organization_id": "orga_bwwWG475zqWiQGur0thQshwVXo8rIYecQHDWFanqhen",
            "date_created": "2019-01-01T00:54:51.337000+00:00",
            "user_name": "P F",
            "id": "oppo_8eB77gAdf8FMy6GsNHEy84f7uoeEWv55slvUjKQZpJt",
            "lead_id": "lead_IIDHIStmFcFQZZP0BRe99V1MCoXWz2PGCm6EDmR9v2O"
        },
        {
            "id": "oppo_klajsdflf8FMy6GsNHEy84f7uoeEWv55slvUjKQZpJt",
            "organization_id": "orga_bwwWG475zqWiQGur0thQshwVXo8rIYecQHDWFanqhen",
            "lead_id": "lead_IIDHIStmFcFQZZP0BRe99V1MCoXWz2PGCm6EDmR9v2O",
            "lead_name": "Wayne Enterprises (Sample Lead)",
            "status_id": "stat_4ZdiZqcSIkoGVnNOyxiEY58eTGQmFNG3LPlEVQ4V7Nk",
            "status_label": "Active",
            "status_type": "active",
            "value": 5000,
            "value_period": "monthly",
            "value_formatted": "$50 monthly",
            "value_currency": "USD",
            "date_won": null,
            "confidence": 75,
            "note": "Bat Cave monthly maintenance cost",
            "user_id": "user_scOgjLAQD6aBSJYBVhIeNr6FJDp8iDTug8Mv6VqYoFn",
            "user_name": "P F",
            "contact_id": null,
            "created_by": null,
            "updated_by": null,
            "date_created": "2019-01-01T00:54:51.337000+00:00",
            "date_updated": "2019-01-01T00:54:51.337000+00:00"
        }
    ],
    "updated_by": "user_04EJPREurd0b3KDozVFqXSRbt2uBjw3QfeYa7ZaGTwI",
    "date_created": "2019-01-01T00:54:51.333000+00:00",
    "id": "lead_IIDHIStmFcFQZZP0BRe99V1MCoXWz2PGCm6EDmR9v2O",
    "description": ""
}

Once you have identified all of the columns you want to insert, you can use the CREATE TABLE statement in Panoply's Redshift data warehouse to create a table to receive all of the data.

With a table built, it may seem like the easiest way to migrate your data (especially if there isn't much of it) is to build INSERT statements to add data to your Redshift table row by row. If you have any experience with SQL, this will be your gut reaction. But beware! Redshift isn't optimized for inserting data one row at a time. If you have a high volume of data to be inserted, you would be better off loading the data into Amazon S3 and then using the COPY command to load it into Redshift.

Now what? You've built a script that pulls data from Close and loads it into your data warehouse, but what happens tomorrow when you have new transactions?

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, Close's API results include fields like date_created that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've take new data into account, you can set your script up as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

Panoply 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, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, or Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax. 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 BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Azure SQL Data Warehouse, To S3, and To Delta Lake.