Stripe is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that lets businesses accept payments online and in mobile apps.

Panoply is a managed data warehouse platform that lets users set up an Amazon Redshift instance in just a few clicks. Complex tasks like schema building, data mining, modeling, scaling, performance tuning, security, and backup are handled by an array of machine learning algorithms. Panoply can import data with no schema, no modeling, and no configuration, and you can use your favorite analysis, SQL, and visualization tools just as you would if you were creating a Redshift data warehouse on your own.

You can get data off of Stripe's servers using the Stripe REST API, which exposes information about core resources, payment methods, subscriptions, and more. To get a list of all customers, for instance, you could call GET /v1/customers.

The Stripe API returns JSON-formatted data. Data from a call to retrieve customers might look like this.

{
  "object": "list",
  "url": "/v1/customers",
  "has_more": false,
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "cus_BykTW2x4M6Yrrt",
      "object": "customer",
      "account_balance": 0,
      "created": 1513697132,
      "currency": "usd",
      "default_source": null,
      "delinquent": false,
      "description": null,
      "discount": null,
      "email": null,
      "livemode": false,
      "metadata": {
      },
      "shipping": null,
      "sources": {
        "object": "list",
        "data": [
    
        ],
        "has_more": false,
        "total_count": 0,
        "url": "/v1/customers/cus_BykTW2x4M6Yrrt/sources"
      },
      "subscriptions": {
        "object": "list",
        "data": [
    
        ],
        "has_more": false,
        "total_count": 0,
        "url": "/v1/customers/cus_BykTW2x4M6Yrrt/subscriptions"
      }
    },
    {...},
    {...}
  ]
}

Now you need to parse the JSON in the API response and map each column to a corresponding field in a table in the destination database. You'll have to know the datatypes for each field. The Stitch Stripe Docs can give you a sense of what datatypes will come through the API.

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

With the table built, you might think that the easiest way to migrate your data (especially if there isn't much of it) would be to build INSERT statements to add data to your Redshift table row by row. Think again! Redshift isn't optimized for inserting data one row at a time. If you have a high volume of data to be inserted, we suggest moving the data into Amazon S3 and then using the COPY command to load it into Redshift.

So, now what? You've built a script that pulls data from Stripe and loads it to your destination, but what happens tomorrow when you have hundreds of new transactions?

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can also identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, Stripe's API results include fields like "created" that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've taken new transactions into account, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

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