Mirror Database

Applications like Hubspot, Pipedrive,Xero and even big applications like Epic are really just screens on top of databases.

Most vendors make it difficult for their customers to just access these databases. There is some genuine technical good reason for that. Sometimes they want to change them.

The economics of many vendors selling cloud applications for instance is that they need to be able to control costs - they use quite a small amount of hardware resources per customer which would become larger if customers started to heavily access the data in these systems.

There are also business reasons - a lot of vendors want to upsell their customers on the ‘gold package’ with extra functionality that is integrated into the system.

So in practice most vendors put limits around how easily their customers can access their own data from the vendor system.

The idea is that you replicate the same data by using IguanaX to feed the data out of the source system APIs into your own database.

The database is read only - it’s a copy of the data from the application. The application is still what we call the “source of truth”. You are not trying to replace the application - it’s a lot of work to build the functionality these applications have.

Once you have your data in a database you control then it’s super easy to do queries off that data.

Using IguanaX you can pipe that data in real time into Spreadsheets Interfaces like Excel and Google Sheets. Then you can report off that data using Pivot Tables and Graphs.

It’s a dream compared to dealing with all the funky crappy reporting tools that vendor solutions have.

This is what really rocks about building mirror databases. It allows you to build reporting and dashboards off your systems in a way you simply cannot do with each vendor application.

In your mirror database you can cross query data between say your customer relationship management system and your accounting system. Or between your content management system with lead data with your customer relationship management system and so on.

This is where things get awesome because you can really Take Control of your Data