Branch Metrics lets businesses generate deep links they can use to track conversions and user engagement on web and mobile transactions. It provides a business analytics dashboard to surface user behavior data.

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.

Branch exposes data for things like install, open, clicks, and web session start through webhooks to user-defined HTTP POST callbacks. You can add a webhook through the Branch dashboard.

Branch exchanges data in JSON format. Here’s an example of the data returned for a clicks endpoint:

POST
User-agent: Branch Metrics API
Content-Type: application/json
{
    click_id: a unique identifier,
    event: 'click',
    event_timestamp: 'link click timestamp',
    os: 'iOS' | 'Android',
    os_version: 'the OS version',
    metadata: {
        ip: 'click IP',
        userAgent: 'click UA',
        browser: 'browser',
        browser_version: 'browser version',
        brand: 'phone brand',
        model: 'phone model',
        os: 'browser OS',
        os_version: 'OS version'
    },
    query: { any query parameters appended to the link },
    link_data: { link data dictionary - see below }
}

// link data dictionary example
{
    branch_id: 'unique identifier for unique link',
    date_ms: 'link creation date with millisecond',
    date_sec: 'link creation date with second',
    date: 'link creation date',
    domain: 'domain label',
    data: {
        +url: the Branch link,
        ... other deep link data
    },
    campaign: 'campaign label',
    feature: 'feature label',
    channel: 'channel label'
    tags: [tags array],
    stage: 'stage label',
}

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. Branch'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. This means you’ll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.

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.

Once you’ve set up the webhooks you want and have begun collecting data, you can relax – as long as everything continues to work correctly. You’ll have to keep an eye out for any changes to Branch’s webhooks implementation.

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.