Mandrill is a transactional email API for MailChimp users. MailChimp, as you may know, is a marketing automation platform that businesses use to send out more than a billion email messages every day. The Mandrill service is a MailChimp add-on that businesses can use to send personalized, one-to-one ecommerce email messages or automated transactional email. The Mandrill API lets developers not only send email programmatically, but also access reporting data.

Apache Superset is a cloud-native data exploration and visualization platform that businesses can use to create business intelligence reports and dashboards. It includes a state-of-the-art SQL IDE, and it's open source software, free of cost. The platform was originally developed at Airbnb and donated to the Apache Software Foundation.

The Mandrill API has clients or wrappers for Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP, and JavaScript. Suppose you want to use Python to extract the data from Mandrill and load it into a data warehouse such as Amazon Redshift. Your first step is to use pip to install the Mandrill API client with a command like sudo pip install mandrill.

Once you have a copy of the Mandrill library, you can start coding with it. Import the library module and instantiate the Mandrill class with this code:

import mandrill
mandrill_client = mandrill.Mandrill('YOUR_API_KEY')

You can then begin accessing data with calls like:

    mandrill_client = mandrill.Mandrill('YOUR_API_KEY')
    result = mandrill_client.exports.info(id='example id')

The returned data will include a URL you can use to fetch the results, which are returned as a ZIP archive. You must then unzip the results to generate a CSV file. You may have to run multiple export commands to get all the data you want, in multiple files.

You must replicate data from your SaaS applications to a data warehouse before you can report on it using Superset. Superset can connect to almost 30 databases and data warehouses. Once you choose a data source you want to connect to, you must specify a host name and port, database name, and username and password to get access to the data. You then specify the database schema or tables you want to work with.

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 Mandrill.

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