

Ask HN: Are there any SaaS services that access your database directly? - fiatjaf

For example, you have a Postgres database and for some reason you also need data from some third-party app elsewhere, say, GitHub.<p>For practical reasons you need the GitHub data inside your database, so you need to build system that fetches the data periodically, or a system that handles GitHub webhooks, and update your database accordingly.<p>Now we can imagine that could be a service that handled this &quot;sync&quot; part for you, fetching data from GitHub and updating it directly in your database.<p>The question is: is it a normal practice to do this? Does it exist somewhere? What are the problems of this approach?
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benologist
I came across this this morning: [http://www.tray.io](http://www.tray.io) via
an article on TC: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/tray-io-raises-2-2m-for-
an-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/tray-io-raises-2-2m-for-an-ifttt-
style-integration-marketplace-to-connect-enterprise-apps/)

I'm guessing there are some annoying problems around 3rd party quality /
stability / undocumented or unofficial APIs.

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anthony_franco
KISSMetrics does the reverse, they bring your DB data into their service
directly. But it's essentially the same setup.

[http://support.kissmetrics.com/integrations/mysql/index.html](http://support.kissmetrics.com/integrations/mysql/index.html)

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dkasper
Looker is a good example
[http://www.looker.com/product/data](http://www.looker.com/product/data)

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iroot
Make sure to grant only select privileges on the database. Don't grant any
privileges on sensitive information tables.

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jackgolding
Looking at doing the same thing with GA and a few other sources.

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fiatjaf
Do you want to provide a service that fetches data from GA API and saves it at
others' databases? Or are you looking for this service?

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Avalaxy
This is what enterprise application integration is all about.

