Important Facebook Ads extractor update

On Friday April 8th we'll be switching our Facebook Ads extractor to Facebook Marketing API from v2.4 to v2.5. If your configuration is using a fixed API version (api_version bucket attribute), please update it manually.

Please see the Graph API changelog to verify your configuration won't break, here's a shortlist:

Marketing API Changes from v2.4 to v2.5

  • Consistent naming for three-level campaign structure between API and UI. This changes naming at endpoint, params, fields, and enum level. For the full list of changes, refer here.
    • Change /adcampaign_groups to /campaigns
    • Change /adcampaigns to /adsets
    • Change /adgroups to /ads
    • In the write path, change campaign_group_status, campaign_status, adgroup_status to status
  • Campaign
    • Change naming of objectives
    • WEBSITE_CLICKS to LINK_CLICKS
    • WEBSITE_CONVERSIONS to CONVERSIONS
  • Targeting
    • Response for call to /search?type=adgeolocation will contain only the 'City' instead of 'City, State'
    • Change {cpc, cpm, cpa}_{min, max, median}, such as cpc_min fields in /reachestimate to bid_amount_min, bid_amount_median, bid_amount_max. Change bid_for to optimize_for

Should you encounter any issues after the update, please let us know at support@keboola.com

In case you need a bit more time to migrate your configuration, use bucket attribute api_version and set it to v2.4. This will give you time until Facebook shuts down this version completely (Monday April 11th).

Orchestration manual run issue

UPDATE: this issue has been solved and one shall not encounter the problem described below.

We have encountered problem when running orchestration manually from the orchestration detail page: 

error message detail: "Error. [Task 0] Job task is different from orchestration task"

We are working on the fix of the problem which should be released within a short while.

Temporal workaround: if you are experiencing such a problem, you can fix it by resaving the orchestration tasks(Edit Tasks->Save).

All other orchestration features are working normally. We are sorry for any inconvenience.  

Orchestrator Phases

We introduce a new concept of grouping orchestration tasks into phases. All tasks in a phase must be independent and so can be run simultaneously at once. In other words, all tasks that belong to the same phase are run in parallel and the next phase begins right after all task from the previous phase are finished. Phases are executed in order specified from top to bottom. There is a limit for running number of simultaneous jobs(i.e. orchestration tasks) that is typically set to 10 per project.

From now on, each and every orchestration task belongs to a phase. The existing orchestration tasks are initially split up into single task phases(one task per one phase).

By editing the orchestration tasks user can group tasks into phases. For example, a common setup could have 3 phases: Extract, Transform and Load.

(tip: when merging phases hold SHIFT to select all phases between two selected phases.)

You can also let automatically group tasks according to their component types(extractor, transformation, writer etc)

Week in Review -- April 4, 2016

Last week was shorter for us due to Easter, but we managed to do more things in a shorter time.

Versions Management

We introduced simple management for transformation buckets. You are now able to rollback to the previous version of your transformation. Or simply copy one version to another.

Read more about Versions Management in previous post.

Documentation

We're still working on our documentation to provide you with best support. Whether for easier components configurations or diving more into Keboola Connection in general.

Check our post about Documentation Changes.

Patches

Thanks to you, our users, we can detect anomalies (or bugs) in components faster. Thus after applying patches, components will be better for all, not only for issue reporters.

  • Small fixes have been applied to Keboola Connection UI
  • Bings Ads extractor, provided by David Ešner, has been updated



Transformation Versions Management

We're introducing a simple versions management for transformation buckets. You can quickly access some functions via a dropdown on transformation bucket page.

This dropdown shows only last 5 versions and allows to quickly rollback any of the previous versions or to copy the current version to a new bucket. All versions are available on a separate page via Show all versions menu option.

There you can see all versions, do a fulltext search within their descriptions, dates or authors, rollback to any version in history or copy any version to a new bucket.

Versions always work with the whole bucket, you cannot rollback or copy a single transformation. 

Please consider this as a first version - we're too excited to present you what we have so far we didn't want to wait to have everything ready. There are plenty of enhancements to come:

  • better change descriptions - we'll be fixing the messages to be more accurate and descriptive
  • versions for all components and their configurations
  • access to versions from transformations and not only buckets
  • diffing
  • dev workspace and committing changes
  • ability to set your own change description

Please let us know your thoughts, happy versioning! And of course, if you experience any unexpected behavior or find a bug, reach out to us at support@keboola.com.

New Application for Personalized Recommendation by Recombee

Have you ever thought about the hidden potential in your data? If you have many products and many customers, Personalized Recommendations by Recombee can boost your business.

You probably have purchases of your customers stored in the Keboola cloud. We prepared an application to show you how our recommendations can change your business. Using your data, the application generates list of recommended products for each of your users, based of his/her personal preferences. The recommendations can be, by example, used for your marketing campaigns. The application is also able to generate list of related products for each product from your catalog, which can be used directly on your e-commerce web pages. Furthermore, we can also deliver valuable insights to help understand your customers and discover complex relationships among products in your data.

Follow this link to learn how to use our application and upload your data simply by selecting right columns in your database table.

 https://git.recombee.net/keboola/recombee-app-description

Week in Review -- March 29, 2016

Another week has gone by at lightning speed. Here's what's new in Keboola Connection.

Documentation

We started overhauling our docs. About time. Read more...

Temporary access to projects

Our support staff (that's us, developers, btw) will stop littering your projects with unused accounts. We're now only allowed to enter your project for a limited period and we must provide a reason. Everything is saved, so you can see what's happening. Thoughts on security, control and privacy? Talk to us!

Bugfixes
  • Truncating Redshift tables now correctly updates bucket stats
New components or component changes
  • Apache Impala extractor
  • Bing Ads extractor, a 3rd party extractor provided by David Ešner
  • S3 writer allows to specify the format of timestamp suffix and optionally compresses the files

Week(s) in Review -- March 21, 2016

Writer News:

The GoodData Writer has successfully migrated all of its configurations from sys buckets to the components API.  The buckets no longer in use will be removed this week.

Also, we're thrilled to now officially support writing to Looker and Qlik.

Extractor News:

Get your hardhats on!  Our DB2 and Firebird extractors now support SSH tunnelling.

In Other News:

Events and Notifications:
  • Newly invited users will not see old project notifications when they join, they will now only see notifications from the time of their joining the project
  • Checking the mark all as read ckeckmark will now mark all notifications as read, not just those loaded to the display
  • Newly joining users will now see all project events, whereas before they'd only see the last 200 events prior to joining the project.
Transformations and Applications:
  • Inputs in the standard interface for input and output mappings now support [space] character 
  • We've noticed that SQL comments larger than 8kb will fail without exception id, so please take note if your SQL is very comment heavy.  
  • We also now support docker containers from private repositories on quay.io