Oracle Responsys, a component of Oracle Marketing Cloud, lets organizations manage and orchestrate marketing campaigns and interactions with customers across email, mobile, social, display, and the web. Responsys provides cross-channel orchestration of customer touchpoints using the medium(s) customers prefer.

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse implemented as a managed service. It runs on the Amazon Web Services architecture using EC2 and S3 instances. Snowflake is designed to be fast, flexible, and easy to work with. For instance, for query processing, Snowflake creates virtual warehouses that run on separate compute clusters, so querying one virtual warehouse doesn't slow down the others.

Responsys has a REST API that you can use to get at information stored in the platform. For example, to retrieve an email or push campaign schedule, you would call GET /rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/{campaignName}/schedule/{scheduleId}.

Here's an example of the kind of response you might see with a query like the one above.

{
    "id": 1491,
    "scheduleType": "ONCE",
    "scheduledTime": "2019-01-25 06:00 AM",
    "launchOptions": {
        "proofLaunch": true,
        "proofLaunchEmail": "someemail@a.com",
        "proofLaunchType": "LAUNCH_TO_ADDRESS",
        "recipientLimit": 3,
        "samplingNthSelection": 1,
        "samplingNthOffset": 1,
        "samplingNthInterval": 1,
        "progressEmailAddresses": [
            "email1@a.com",
            "email2@a.com"
        ],
        "progressChunk": "CHUNK_10K",
        "links": [
            {
                "rel": "self",
                "href": "/rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/test/schedule/1491",
                "method": "POST"
            },
            {
                "rel": "createSchedule",
                "href": "/rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/test/schedule",
                "method": "GET"
            },
            {
                "rel": "updateSchedule",
                "href": "rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/test/schedule/1491",
                "method": "PUT"
            },
            {
                "rel": "deleteSchedule",
                "href": "rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/test/schedule/1491",
                "method": "DELETE"
            }
        ]
    }
}

If you don't already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you'll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you'll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them. Responsys's documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.

Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" – some of the objects may actually be lists. In these cases you'll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.

Depending on the structure of your data, you may need to prepare it for loading. Look at the supported data types for Snowflake and make sure that the data you've got will map neatly to them.

Note that you don't need to define a schema in advance when loading JSON data into Snowflake.

The Snowflake documentation's Data Loading Overview section can help you with the task of loading your data. If you're not loading a lot of data, you might be able to use the data loading wizard in the Snowflake web UI, but chances are the limitations on that tool will make it a non-starter as a reliable ETL solution. Alternatively, there are two main steps for getting data into Snowflake:

• Use the PUT command to stage files.
• Use the COPY INTO table command to load prepared data into an awaiting table.

You’ll have the option of copying from your local drive or from Amazon S3. One of Snowflake's slick features lets you make a virtual warehouse that can power the insertion process.

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.

Responsys lacks key fields that a script could use to bookmark its progression as it looks for updated data. However, you can create .csv or .txt files as part of a Responsys Connect data export job and use a date/time prefix or suffix in the file names. You could then set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it's exported from Responsys.

Snowflake 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, or Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax, or Panoply, which works with Redshift instances. 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 Panoply, To Azure Synapse Analytics, To S3, and To Delta Lake.