Vero is an event-driven email platform businesses can use to drive customer interaction campaigns.

When it was released in 2013, Amazon Redshift was the first cloud data warehouse. It uses defined schemas, columnar data storage, and massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture to provide a base for analytics reporting.

You can collect that data from Vero's servers using webhooks and user-defined HTTP callbacks. Set up the webhook in your Vero account and define a URL that your script listens to and from which it can collect data.

Once you've set up HTTP endpoints, Vero will begin sending data via the POST request method. You can access useful objects such as sent, delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, and unsubscribed. Data will be enclosed in the body of the request in JSON format. Here's a sample of what an inbound webhook with data from the Vero endpoint looks like.

{
        "sent_at":1435016238,
        "type":"sent",
        "user": {
            "id":123,
            "email":"steve@getvero.com"
        },
        "campaign": {
            "id":987,
            "type":"transactional",
            "name":"Order confirmation",
            "subject":"Your order is being processed!",
            "trigger-event":"purchased item",
            "permalink":"http://app.getvero.com/view/1/341d64944577ac1f70f560e37db54a25",
            "variation":"Variation A"
        }
    }

Once you've identified the columns you want to insert, you can use the Redshift CREATE TABLE statement to set up a table to receive all of the data.

To populate that table, you might be tempted to use INSERT statements to add data to your Redshift table row by row. Don't do that; Redshift isn't optimized for inserting data one row at a time. If you have a high volume of data to be inserted, a better approach is to load the data into Amazon S3 and use the COPY command to migrate it into Redshift.

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 Vero.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Vero 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.

Redshift is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, or Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, 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 BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Panoply, To Azure Synapse Analytics, To S3, and To Delta Lake.