Background 

etrailer.com is the world’s leading online retailer of custom-fit towing accessories. They carry thousands of vehicle accessories such as custom-fit trailer hitches for over 3,100 different vehicles, performance chips, heavy-duty towing supplies, trailer parts, bike racks, and much more. etrailer.com aims to help customers make their vehicles both useful and fun.  

Use Case 

etrailer.com wanted to find an efficient way to manage their growing data volumes from various sources. With data scattered across multiple databases (including MySQL, SQL Server, Splunk, Google Analytics) and a desire for real-time integration and API connectivity, the company sought a reliable solution to streamline their data integration and ETL processes. 

etrailer.com started looking into building and maintaining a data warehouse architecture from scratch. They shortlisted a dimensional model for a potential data warehouse architecture.  However, loading and maintaining this type of data warehouse required IT resources to be always available. Additionally, etrailer.com also wanted effective data transformations to address diverse scenarios, including complex mappings, fuzzy text matching, incremental updates, dimension changes, and stored procedure optimization. These would all be difficult for etrailer.com to create from scratch.  

Enter Astera Data Warehouse Builder 

etrailer.com approached Astera’s team because they wanted to use Astera Data Warehouse Builder (ADWB) to create a tailored solution. ADWB effectively met etrailer.com’s unique needs by connecting to various sources like MySQL, SQL Server, Splunk, and numerous flat files, streamlining data integration.  

With Astera’s help, the company enabled centralized data administration, including real-time processing and easy integration with external APIs for data retrieval and task automation. Additionally, the platform enabled seamless data transformation, which ensured the company’s data quality and usability. The platform’s strong architecture allowed for smooth handling of large data volumes, ensuring scalability for etrailer.com’s growing data requirements. 

The implementation process began with an extensive training module with Astera experts to teach etrailer.com’s team how to make the most out of ADWB. With the easy-to-use tool at their fingertips, the etrailer.com team took control of their data landscape.  

With ADWB successfully implemented, etrailer.com experienced remarkable improvements in their data processes, which included:  

• Data Integration and ETL: With Astera’s solution’s intuitive visual interface, etrailer.com’s team effortlessly designed data integration workflows and managed ETL processes efficiently. 
• Custom Connectors: ADWB’s flexibility allowed etrailer.com to develop custom connectors, helping with fully integrating APIs into the company’s data pipelines and expanding their data access capabilities.  
• Maximum Runtime Control: Astera’s platform allowed etrailer.com to set a maximum runtime for pipeline jobs, automatically triggering alerts for excessively long-running tasks, which enhanced their overall efficiency.
• Source Control: ADWB provided robust source control functionality via GIT, enabling etrailer.com to manage and review artifacts seamlessly, ensuring data integrity and security.  
• Dimensional Modeling: ADWB’s powerful data modeling component allowed etrailer.com to build and deploy data marts to create a self-sustaining data warehousing architecture. They were able to leverage the transaction date key feature to load their warehouse with transactional information from the past few years.  
• Complex Transformations: ADWB empowered etrailer.com with seamless data transformations, including mapping, text matching, complex relations, and incremental updates. 
• Time to Value: The elimination of manual processes resulted in etrailer.com achieving a 50% reduction in time to value for their data.