Fivetran Introduces Breakthrough for Database Replication

By AIT News Desk On Jun 24, 2021

Acquisition of new technology improves reliability, performance and ease of use in fast-growing database replication market

Fivetran, the leading automated data integration provider, announced the acquisition of Teleport Data, bringing a breakthrough innovation to the challenges of database replication.

When trying to transfer data from a source location to a warehouse, it can be difficult to track changes and ensure data quality and consistency as source location data is constantly changing. Current solutions like snapshots — which essentially take a picture of that data from one static point in time — are slow and not real-time, while log-based change data capture solutions are hard to configure and set up. With Fivetran Teleport Sync, database replication is now simple like snapshots, delivering performance that in some cases approaches the speed of log-based systems, while being much less intrusive — making access to data easier across the organization.

“We are prioritizing the development and acquisition of new replication technologies so that Fivetran is the most robust and easy-to-use data pipeline solution in the market — something that we take very seriously as we continue our mission to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity,” said George Fraser, CEO of Fivetran. “I became acquainted with Teleport Data through a dialogue in a Slack community. We were discussing the challenges of data validation, and I was presented with a method that had not been previously considered. It proved to be a very innovative invention and it will serve our customers well.”

Enterprises and organizations of all sizes are now facing an explosion of data that is often hard to access for insights. As organizations accelerate their digital transformations, particularly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, new insights from data become critically important. However, to most quickly and accurately discover them, access to secure database binary log files was required to ship database changes to another target system. This method has proven hard for users to configure, requires specialized security access, and is error-prone. Fivetran Teleport Sync avoids these challenges completely by moving only the changed data, without requiring access to secure binary log files. The new capability will be available later this year.

Additional benefits of Teleport Sync include:

Less database overhead typically associated with logs, timestamp columns to indicate changes, or primary keys on illogical tables.
A code-free method to set up historical analysis. Teleport Sync captures all data without highly customized scripts.
Improvement on throughput without needing network engineers or extra/load query analysis.

“Teleport Data is another example of Fivetran’s singular ability to address the challenges enterprises now face as they undergo digital transformations, where speed is a core requirement in accessing, analyzing and deploying the latest data,” said Bob Muglia, entrepreneur, former Snowflake CEO and Microsoft President. “Fivetran is once again showing itself to be the ELT leader, innovating so that customers of all sizes have access to actionable data at any time.”

In addition to Teleport Sync, Fivetran has introduced a number of other database replication enhancements that make centralizing data dramatically easier for data systems, including history mode, a code-free approach to historical analysis that records every version of each record in the source table to the corresponding table in a destination. Fivetran also continuously delivers speed improvements, such as throughout the end-to-end replication process. From data extraction improvements to processing and load optimizations, Fivetran has enhanced its speeds across the board.

“Fivetran history mode allows our software developers to focus on what they do best — engineering fast transactions on our platform — without having to worry about how to capture data changes that occur within those transactions,” said Beth Mattson, Data Engineer, Field Nation. “Historically, when the product team has become interested in a new feature, our software engineers have had to find a way to either build out a new log or strong-arm intermediate data changes into our existing logging system. No more. The business systems team now has access to ephemeral, changing data sets effortlessly. We’re incredibly pleased with this new option.”