Taboola calls itself a "discovery platform" or a "reverse search engine." It delivers personalized content recommendations to more than a billion users who visit many of the web's most popular websites every month. You've probably seen Taboola content yourself – a block of images and headlines labeled "Sponsored Links by Taboola." The links are designed to increase user engagement with the sites on which they appear.

Azure Synapse (formerly Azure SQL Data Warehouse) is a cloud-based petabyte-scale columnar database service with controls to manage compute and storage resources independently. It offers encryption of data at rest and dynamic data masking to mask sensitive data on the fly, and it integrates with Azure Active Directory. It can replicate to read-only databases in different geographic regions for load balancing and fault tolerance.

Developers can pull data out of Taboola's servers using its Backstage API. For instance, you could fetch information about a campaign by calling GET /backstage/api/1.0/[account-id]/campaigns/[campaign-id]/items/.

The response from Taboola's Backstage API comes in JSON format, and might look like this:

{
  "results":[
      {
      "id": "1",
      "campaign_id": "124",
      "type": "ITEM",
      "url": "http://news.example.com/article.htm",
      "thumbnail_url": "http://cdn.example.com/image.jpg",
      "title": "Demo Article",
      "approval_state": "APPROVED",
      "is_active": true,
      "status": "RUNNING"
    }
    ]
  }

Azure Synapse provides a multi-step process for loading data. After extracting the data from its source, you can move it to Azure Blob storage or Azure Data Lake Store. You can then use one of three utilities to load the data:

• AZCopy uses the public internet.
• Azure ExpressRoute routes the data through a dedicated private connection to Azure, bypassing the public internet by using a VPN or point-to-point Ethernet network.
• The Azure Data Factory (ADF) cloud service has a gateway that you can install on your local server, then use to create a pipeline to move data to Azure Storage.

From Azure Storage you can load the data into Azure Synapse staging tables by using Microsoft's PolyBase technology. You can run any transformations you need while the data is in staging, then insert it into production tables. Microsoft offers documentation for 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.

Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Taboola.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Taboola modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.

Azure Synapse 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, Snowflake, or Panoply, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3 or Delta Lake on Databricks. 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, To S3, and To Delta Lake.