Oracle Responsys, a component of Oracle Marketing Cloud, lets organizations manage and orchestrate marketing campaigns and interactions with customers across email, mobile, social, display, and the web. Responsys provides cross-channel orchestration of customer touchpoints using the medium(s) customers prefer.

Delta Lake is an open source storage layer that sits on top of existing data lake file storage, such AWS S3, Azure Data Lake Storage, or HDFS. It uses versioned Apache Parquet files to store data, and a transaction log to keep track of commits, to provide capabilities like ACID transactions, data versioning, and audit history.

Responsys has a REST API that you can use to get at information stored in the platform. For example, to retrieve an email or push campaign schedule, you would call GET /rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/{campaignName}/schedule/{scheduleId}.

Here's an example of the kind of response you might see with a query like the one above.

{
    "id": 1491,
    "scheduleType": "ONCE",
    "scheduledTime": "2019-01-25 06:00 AM",
    "launchOptions": {
        "proofLaunch": true,
        "proofLaunchEmail": "someemail@a.com",
        "proofLaunchType": "LAUNCH_TO_ADDRESS",
        "recipientLimit": 3,
        "samplingNthSelection": 1,
        "samplingNthOffset": 1,
        "samplingNthInterval": 1,
        "progressEmailAddresses": [
            "email1@a.com",
            "email2@a.com"
        ],
        "progressChunk": "CHUNK_10K",
        "links": [
            {
                "rel": "self",
                "href": "/rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/test/schedule/1491",
                "method": "POST"
            },
            {
                "rel": "createSchedule",
                "href": "/rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/test/schedule",
                "method": "GET"
            },
            {
                "rel": "updateSchedule",
                "href": "rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/test/schedule/1491",
                "method": "PUT"
            },
            {
                "rel": "deleteSchedule",
                "href": "rest/api/v1.3/campaigns/test/schedule/1491",
                "method": "DELETE"
            }
        ]
    }
}

If you don't already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you'll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you'll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them. Responsys's documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.

Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" – some of the objects may actually be lists. In these cases you'll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.

To create a Delta table, you can use existing Apache Spark SQL code and change the format from parquet, csv, or json to delta. Once you have a Delta table, you can write data into it using Apache Spark's Structured Streaming API. The Delta Lake transaction log guarantees exactly-once processing, even when there are other streams or batch queries running concurrently against the table. By default, streams run in append mode, which adds new records to the table. Databricks provides quickstart documentation that explains the whole process.

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

Responsys lacks key fields that a script could use to bookmark its progression as it looks for updated data. However, you can create .csv or .txt files as part of a Responsys Connect data export job and use a date/time prefix or suffix in the file names. You could then set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it's exported from Responsys.

Delta Lake on Databricks is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, or Snowflake, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax, or Panoply, which works with Redshift instances. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Panoply, and To S3.