Mandrill is a transactional email API for MailChimp users. MailChimp, as you may know, is a marketing automation platform that businesses use to send out more than a billion email messages every day. The Mandrill service is a MailChimp add-on that businesses can use to send personalized, one-to-one ecommerce email messages or automated transactional email. The Mandrill API lets developers not only send email programmatically, but also access reporting data.

Looker is a powerful, modern business intelligence platform that has become the new standard for how modern enterprises analyze their data. From large corporations to agile startups, savvy companies can leverage Looker's analysis capabilities to monitor the health of their businesses and make more data-driven decisions.

Looker is differentiated from other BI and analysis platforms for a number of reasons. Most notable is the use of LookML, a proprietary language for describing dimensions, aggregates, calculations, and data relationships in a SQL database. LookML enables organizations to abstract the query logic behind their analyses from the content of their reports, making their analytics easy to manage, evolve, and scale.

The Mandrill API has clients or wrappers for Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP, and JavaScript. Suppose you want to use Python to extract the data from Mandrill and load it into a data warehouse such as Amazon Redshift. Your first step is to use pip to install the Mandrill API client with a command like sudo pip install mandrill.

Once you have a copy of the Mandrill library, you can start coding with it. Import the library module and instantiate the Mandrill class with this code:

import mandrill
mandrill_client = mandrill.Mandrill('YOUR_API_KEY')

You can then begin accessing data with calls like:

    mandrill_client = mandrill.Mandrill('YOUR_API_KEY')
    result = mandrill_client.exports.info(id='example id')

The returned data will include a URL you can use to fetch the results, which are returned as a ZIP archive. You must then unzip the results to generate a CSV file. You may have to run multiple export commands to get all the data you want, in multiple files.

To perform its analyses, Looker connects to your company's database or data warehouse, where the data you want to analyze is stored. Some popular data warehouses include Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake.

Looker's documentation offers instructions on how to configure and connect your data warehouse. In most cases, it's simply a matter of creating and copying access credentials, which may include a username, password, and server information. You can then move data from your various data sources into your data warehouse for Looker to use.

Once your data warehouse is connected to Looker, you can build constructs known as explores, each of which is a SQL view containing a specific set of data for analysis. An example might be "orders" or "customers."

Once you've selected any given explore, you can filter data based on any column available in the view, group data based on certain fields in the view (known as dimensions), calculate outputs such as sums and counts (known as measures), and pick a visualization type such as a bar chart, pie chart, map, or bubble chart.

Beyond this simple use case, Looker offers a broad universe of functionality that allows you to conduct analyses and share them with your organization. You can get started with this walkthrough in Looker's documentation.

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.

Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Mandrill.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Mandrill modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.