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Comment by pkrein | Hacker News Reader

Actually, we don't have any interest in being a visualization tool, and are super focused on building customer data infrastructure of the future.

This product release is in close partnership with our BI partners (Looker, Mode, Wagon, Periscope, BIME and Chartio). One of the biggest problems our mutual customers face is getting data into their warehouse so that they can use the BI tool in the first place. This launch significantly expands the possible audience for them.

Even better, all of our BI partners built out-of-the-box reporting and dashboards based on Segment's schemas for these new third party sources. So our mutual customers can get set up even faster.

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Hey pkrein, I am a Segment fan and startup-scale user of your warehouse service. The warehouse service is super convenient, but its main shortfall for us is that you don't offer historical backfilling of data more than 60 days before the warehouse was enabled. That is the data we need in our warehouse most.

There are other ways to load in Salesforce, Zendesk, or Stripe data. It is certainly nice to be able to do that all with Segment -- but it is not necessary. Sources is nice to have, but the core warehouse service is not really complete (for us, and I suspect others too) until you can seamlessly support data backfill at all price tiers. A one-time fee for backfill fee would be okay, but saying "no we don't support that" makes me sad.

Yep, as part of this launch we've revised our pricing. If you commit to an annual plan (even self-service plan) we will load all of your historical data, not just 60 days. Just email friends@segment.com after signing up for the paid annual plan and we'll make it happen on the next sync.

Very cool, thanks for the update.

Interesting. The pricing is a little confusing for the rest of us who are considering Segment for the first time (the warehouse part..not the integrations) - especially the size of data and how we load it.

Maybe you are estimating data size based on known types of data in salesforce,zendesk,etc. But what if i want to load data from my internal dB as well? The 60 day notions,etc.

Can someone use Segment to generate per-user reporting data?

So, instead of Total Company Sales this Month, I want Bob's Sales, Joe's Sales, etc. It feels like this is just a filter on top of what you already have. Almost like a parameterized query? (pass in @UserId for a where statement)

I originally thought maybe this is the job for one of your visualization partners but you really need to filter the results before you perform the aggregate.

That's kind of a broad question, but in theory, for sure. Once you've got the raw data in your own warehouse, you can roll up at any level of specificity. So that could be per salesperson, per product, per date, per office, whatever. The key is first getting the raw data out of the vendors' control and into your own warehouse.

hey vyrotek - you can definitely build that report using Segment sources + BI tool.

Our salesforce source pulls in the Salesforce `Opportunities` and `Users` table (your sales team members). So to get sales by sales rep, you can join the `Opportunities` table to `Users` table, and then aggregate by sales rep.

Once you get the raw data into your data warehouse, you have a ton of flexibility with how you aggregate and analyze it.

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