Building complex data pipelines that manipulate and enrich data can be complicated. And it can be even harder to accurately spec and design, given how third party APIs often don’t often behave as expected in real world use cases.
Thankfully, it’s easier than ever to build a working prototype of your next data pipeline or API – using no code tools.
In this article we’re going to look at three tools which are ideal for building a working product.
In our example project, we’re going to enrich a user’s email address with data from Clearbit as soon as a new record appears in our database.
We have a few requirements for things these tools need to be able to do…
– Look up and extract items for pre existing databases
– Integrate with third party APIs
– Perform data transformations
– Save items to existing databases
Tools
Zapier. Zapier is an amazingly flexible tool with a huge number of existing integrations to well known databases and apps. To accomplish our enrichment we simply need to connect our Postgres database with Zapier and monitor for new entires. When we see a new one we need to enrich it using the Clearbit API and save the result back to the postgres database.
Parabola. Parabola is a similar tool to Zapier however it’s more focussed on data transformations and manipulations. Like Zapier, it already has a number of apps and database connections built in.
Bubble. Bubble allows you to build custom ‘API Workflows’ which allow you to perform very advanced manipulations on data. Bubble lets you connect any third party API through it’s built in API connector – and also has a thriving plugin store of plugins you can use to connect to third party services.
Each of these tools has a different set of strengths and weaknesses, which we’ll go into more depth in on our next post.
