3rd party data connections and integrations

KNIME Analytics Platform
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I am hesitant to write about this here, but I am trying to understand the capabilities and use of different 3rd party data connections and integrations in KNIME and very little information exists beyond company / product marketing. I would prefer a PM response if there is any change that the content could be a forum policy violation.

I am constantly delayed waiting on multiple clients to send me manual software exports. I can get around this somewhat in the long term with software specific 3rd party export / import solutions / windows task scheduling and fileshare solutions, but I would really like to transition to having a direct connection to the database of various software platforms without an existing connection node.

Do I even need to look into this, or is there some relatively easy / quick way to set these direct connections up manually that I am missing? It seems like there are no ā€œopen sourceā€ driver solutions to most of these platformsā€¦

Some Platforms: Essentially the desktop and online versions of all accounting platforms, a few eCommerce sites, CRMs, Social Media / Advertisement tracking, and hopefully a simple setup for custom connectors to industry specific management software solutions.

JDBC vs the purported ā€œAIā€ solutions? Capability differences, ease of use / speed of work?

Do any 3rd party solutions handle read + writeback through the connections and integrations, or are they read only?

Any user experience or recommendations?

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@iCFO welcome to the KNIME forum. Since KNIME is a platform it deals with external data sources all the time. You can use the internal data storage of KNIME as well as all sorts of external data. So I donā€™t think there is a policy problem at all.

Then the question would be what kind of external data/system we are talking about. Example might be:

  • files like CSV, Excel or Parquet (and more)
  • JSON and XML files
  • databases like MySQL, ORACLE and everything that would come with a driver (JDBC)
  • Big Data systems like Cloudera
  • Cloud and remote file systems like Microsoft/Azure, Google and so on
  • specialized data formats where there is a KNIME node / driver (strong in chemical informatics)
  • more specialized formats you might be able to access via R/RStudio, Python or even Java
  • things you can access/do via REST-API

KNIME also can handle external tools where you would just ā€˜callā€™ a tool/system and let it do its job.

So if you could describe further what you are looking for there is a good chance KNIME might have a solution.

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I am specifically chasing direct connections and integrations with software platforms (Quickbooks, Sage, eCommerce sites, etc.) that do not have an existing connector node available.

They appear to require 3rd party JBDC drivers or 3rd party data transfer services.

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About quickbooks there was this debate and there seem to be 3rd party (commercial) drivers:

Another thing might be web-scaling that also could help to ingest data. I think you would have to select a case and start to try a few things. From my experience you then get to know the challenges and typically knime would offer a way forward.

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