Hey there! Welcome to my tech blog. I’m excited to share a little project: automating Shopify orders data into a database warehouse and setting up the connection for analysis. I wanted a simple way to fetch data and get real-time insights without all the manual effort. So, I set up AWS Event Scheduler to trigger data retrieval, used AWS Lambda for serverless processing, and chose DynamoDB for storage. To connect DynamoDB to Microsoft Power BI, I used CDATA Universal Software to create an ODBC driver.
I’m sure there are more sophisticated solutions out there and this is my humble approach, but I hope you find this useful! Let’s turn Shopify orders into awesome business insights together!
Setup
- AWS Lambda: I created a Lambda function to fetch data from Shopify and store it in DynamoDB.
- AWS Event Scheduler: I use Event Scheduler to trigger the Lambda function daily.
- AWS DynamoDB: While a relational database might be better for a data warehouse, I opted for DynamoDB for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness.
- CDATA Amazon DynamoDB ODBC Driver: I configured my DynamoDB ODBC driver with CDATA since they offer free trials. This driver is essential for pulling data into Power BI since it doesn’t support DynamoDB out-of-the-box.
- Power BI: Finally, I set up the ODBC driver as a data source in Power BI to pull in my data and start visualizing!
- CloudWatch: I also set up CloudWatch for logging to keep track of everything.
Improvements
- Explore a Relational Database: Consider using Amazon RDS instead of DynamoDB for enhanced data management and querying capabilities, leading to more efficient analysis.
- Improve Error Handling: Implement more robust error handling in the AWS Lambda function to ensure better resilience during data retrieval.
- Flexible Scheduling: Adjust the data retrieval schedule based on business needs, rather than sticking to a fixed daily trigger, to optimize resource usage.
- Data Validation and Transformation: Incorporate processes for data validation and transformation before loading data into DynamoDB to improve overall data quality.
- Enhance Power BI Dashboards: Add more interactive elements and deeper analytics in Power BI to provide valuable insights for decision-making.
Check out this project on my GitHub.
Thank you for visiting!