Does anyone integrate with their customers' DB directly?

Re:Does anyone integrate with their customers' DB directly? by airpodsman on Monday September 02, 2024 @08:45AM (#41424948)

I was thinking the same thing. I have an idea that I've been thinking about for some time but requires data to the Customer's Data. They'd have to expose us to ingest that either through : 1) an API that the customer exposes to you 2) Connected to the data source directly in a secure manner.

Option 1 seems like a lot of work for the customer ... probably not viable.

Option 2: you can securely connect to their data-source using oAuth2.0. In fact I know MongoDB offers this (https://www.mongodb.com/docs/atlas/security-oidc/) for this exact use-case I believe. I recall using Vercel to integrate with my MongoDB.

MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/docs/atlas/security-oidc/ Supabase: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth

Though I haven't done it directly, I think integrating with the DB through a secure protocol like oAuth is the way to go. DB services offer this and must be for this exact use case.

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Re:Does anyone integrate with their customers' DB directly? by johnyeocx on Monday September 02, 2024 @09:29AM (#41425241)

that's what I thinking actually, using oauth to connect to a DB is definitely a new concept though, and most larger enterprises either use data warehouses or self hosted DBs (just a guess), so oauth may not be an option

If the SaaS target customers are smaller companies / startups, then this may be viable

I'd love to hear more about your idea though! would you mind sharing a little bit about it?

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Re:Does anyone integrate with their customers' DB directly? by airpodsman on Monday September 02, 2024 @03:56PM (#41428304)

Let me know if you end up researching this further and what the conclusion is. I think the best way to tackle this would be via an API the customers can give you.

The idea is a simple marketing tool to help businesses reach out to customers that didn’t convert fully through the funnel. So for example, user created a profile, but didn’t end up purchasing.

If interested, I can share the link (once it’s up) and would love to get your feedback.

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Re:Does anyone integrate with their customers' DB directly? by cj on Monday September 02, 2024 @08:37PM (#41430046)

> If the SaaS target customers are smaller companies / startups, then this may be viable

I’m your target audience.

The #1 issue I have with this concept is, as a customer, I would have to trust that you understand the performance limits of my production database and that you won’t run (even accidentally) a burst of inefficient queries that takes down or impairs production.

One way around this would be to query against a replica / secondary, but even then you risk overloading a secondary/replica, which could have negative effects in a failover scenario.

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