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Will the lack of a real-time pipeline be a future limitation for Fivetran?

Conor McCarter

Co-founder at Prequel

This goes back to what we were saying earlier about the difference between the analytics versus the transactional use cases. 

For analytics use cases, real-time doesn't seem to be a huge issue for data teams. If the data's going to end up in a report or a dashboard or a query in some sort of ad hoc analysis, a 15-minute delay is totally fine. 

That said, when you get into some transactional use cases that straddle the line between what is transactional and what is an analytics query, I think there are specific use cases that are difficult without the real-time focused data warehouse that you were mentioning.

The Drizly team put out a really interesting article about a use case that they had that could not be met by their existing data warehouse for cart abandonment notifications.

For that, they actually had to find a specific, real-time focused data warehouse for that use case in particular. 

There is a smattering of those use cases where you do need something that's a little bit more focused on the real-time problem, but what we're hearing from the market is that for almost all use cases, a few minute delay is totally fine.

Find this answer in Conor McCarter, co-founder of Prequel, on Fivetran's existential risk
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