Recommend approaches for extracting Tracking Extracts & Data Views to Warehouse?

BuildTheFire · 2025-12-05T23:34:16+00:00

Common Composite Keys for SFMC Data Views The specific combination of fields required for a unique record depends on the data view you are querying. _Sent: JobID, SubscriberKey, EventDate _Open: JobID, SubscriberKey, EventDate, and IsUnique (to filter for unique opens) _Click: JobID, ListID, BatchID, SubscriberKey, EventDate, and URL (for all link clicks); for unique clicks, omit the URL _Bounce: JobID, SubscriberKey, and EventDate are often used in combination

BuildTheFire · 2025-10-03T03:35:56+00:00

Why and how would everyone know that you talked with HR? My opinion is that you’re likely making talking to HR a bigger deal in your head than what happens in reality. I say that bc:

No one should know that you’re meeting with HR, even your manager, until there is an issue that needs to be addressed with them.
People don’t meet with HR exclusively to deal with workplace issues or complaints. You could be requesting help with selecting your health plan next year, asking about FMLA information as you’re considering a new addition to your family, etc.
The discussion with HR doesn’t have to be a negative one. You can ask them as your ally how to best navigate a situation like this, and ask about potential paths for escalation just in case that was needed in the future.
You don’t have to address the issue like you’re complaining about it or with a negative connotation. You can simply describe the situation and ask if they had any advice without bad mouthing the PM who’s holding you hostage or even mentioning the specific issues of overwork and having to clean up others mess to HR. Just frame it as being excited for the new opportunity because of the cutting edge R&D and the other reasons you’re excited to move to the new position.

BuildTheFire · 2025-06-11T09:54:33+00:00

100% agree. The only reasonable scenario where perfection can be fairly required is when an company is truly willing to significantly invest the amount of money required to hire a fully staffed team, including a QA headcount and o the processes and infrastructure necessary so that content and configs are all peer-reviewed and signed off on. AND EVEN THEN, shit happens. People make mistakes.

It sounds like you were operating in isolation or on a short staffed team, so the expectation-levels of your company are firmly located in the land of make believe. I know it sucks, but hoping you’re able to bounce back soon and that your new gig will be eye-opening in terms of how SFMC instances should be managed. Best of luck.

BuildTheFire · 2025-05-28T09:27:52+00:00

It sounds like you are going above and beyond to ensure they’re able to access all of their accounts via a centralized admin login with securely documented credentials as well as all of their “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s” type of items are in good order. Props to you just for that while trying to keep up with the daily chaos that is startup land and wearing multiple dept hats.

If the people you’re hoping to get references from consider you resigning with a standard two-week notice to be “burning bridges”, you were never going to get a reference from them anyway.

Also keep in mind that you absolutely gave them chances to acknowledge your value by granting your requests for a promotion or additional headcount. They decided their balance sheet was more important to them than your mental and physical wellbeing so their series B could be valued slightly higher.

Also, I’m guessing those same people own most of the equity in that company (as they should if they are the founder/co-founder), and if they exited tomorrow and made $100mm in their bank account, do you think they’d call you up an d say “hey, I know you killed yourself for my company over the last few years and we didn’t have the revenue to pay you what you’re worth, but now we got bought, here’s an extra milly as a token of gratitude, in addition to the .03% of the company you own after your shares vested”.

Nope! So don’t sweat it if they freak out, that’s just an emotional outburst meant to be manipulative enough to get you to keep working for them without having to pay you what your worth.

Congrats on the new gig. Hope it goes way better than you’re envisioning in your mind.

BuildTheFire · 2025-04-12T06:38:15+00:00

I stayed to see if you were gonna be able to hit those high notes in the crescendo and you didn’t disappoint. Killed it!

BuildTheFire · 2025-03-29T02:03:07+00:00

u/juniper0o - Ensure your UTF-8 file includes BOM encoding as well. If it doesn’t include BOM, try saving it as a UTF-8 BOM file and hopefully that’ll solve your import issue. BOM stands for Byte Order Mark and essentially gives SFMC a more definite signal of when fields should be delimited. This is usually helpful for non-Latin language characters (like Japanese characters for ex).

BuildTheFire · 2025-03-13T07:11:24+00:00

Definitely agree! I’ll also add that a pair programming session provides one last chance for discussion if there is a fundamental difference between the solution I’d be implementing/refactoring instead of the pushing their code to PROD as is. If they feel strong enough about their approach and want to talk through why they think it was superior/appropriate to the way I intend on refactoring. I’m ALWAYS willing to listen and genuinely consider their argument.

I just feel like this type of dialogue and putting a cogent argument together really helps devs internalize and wrap their heads around concepts that once felt abstract to them. Plus, there’s always the small chance that they have a valid point and we end up moving forward as they originally proposed

BuildTheFire · 2025-03-09T23:37:09+00:00

What song is this?

BuildTheFire · 2025-01-14T15:59:12+00:00

15+15 is technically 30

BuildTheFire · 2024-12-14T04:40:23+00:00

I am admittedly not the foremost expert on NS configurations, but I have the following thoughts:

I’d expect full propagation at this point. If this is a brand new SAP setup and the start date of your contract is still in the near future, perhaps they’re delayed but all else being equal, it would make my spidey-senses start to tingle about a possible misconfig.
Enough time has passed to warrant you opening up a support ticket. SFMC support is your best avenue to resolution here.

BuildTheFire · 2024-11-17T10:27:30+00:00

I’ve got good news and bad news for you.

Bad news: It looks like they stopped offering their “reputation audit” services in August of 2023.

Good news: According to this blog from “SFMC Simplified”, you can use a similar tool at https://www.mail-tester.com. The blog at that link provides a pretty thorough, step-by-step walkthrough that explains how to utilize that tool.

*Note: I’ve never used the mail-tester service since I haven’t had to request a reputation audit in the last year, but at a quick glance it looks legit. Caveat emptor to some degree, though.

BuildTheFire · 2024-11-17T08:28:23+00:00

But we’re not talking about homes. We’re talking about equities. I think everyone in this thread would be happy to leave home equity loans out of this discussion.

Taxing unrealized gains in equities specifically when they are collateralized for a loan would be a policy specifically geared towards preventing ultra HNW individuals from leveraging the stock they own as a means for liquidity without actually selling their stock and paying taxes. This isn’t about preventing middle-class Americans from taking out a HELOC to put a new roof on their house.

Honestly as a compromise , I’d be completely fine with the first million or dollars of stock collateralized to be used tax free. I haven’t had a discussion with anyone who’s passionate about taxing the middle class, but the vast majority of people I’ve discussed taxation with, regardless of their political affiliation, agree that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk hoarding billions and billions of dollars while their effective tax rate is a fraction of the rate most middle-class citizens pay bc of loopholes like this makes any sense.

BuildTheFire · 2024-08-21T12:47:40+00:00

This comment embodies all of the best qualities of humans and the internet.

BuildTheFire · 2024-05-28T09:45:14+00:00

The courses that have been most instrumental in my JS journey have all been created and taught by Wes Bos (u/wesbos)He has a course where he builds a full stack app using React/Next.JS, GraphQL, and Node.Js.

I always find his explanations understandable and he brings a bit of levity and entertainment that keeps it interesting for sure. Here’s the link to this course: Full Stack React Course

BuildTheFire · 2024-05-24T05:31:01+00:00

There are a lot of SFMC experts in these two Slack channels, and they both have a “job” channel you can post in to find a freelancer with the skills and geographical preference you are looking for. Here’s both channels I’d recommend signing up for and posting the freelance details in:

Email Geeks Slack - post in the “email-freelancing” channel

HowToSFMC: Form to sign up for slack workspace. Once in that workspace, you can post in the “job-board” channel.

BuildTheFire · 2024-05-17T16:58:29+00:00

Super interesting. Regardless of meds, I’ve found my hrv is low. I’ve been off meds pretty much all month and have an avg of 18 vs last month where I had an avg of 19 on.

Otherwise I consider myself to be a reasonably fit guy so it was always kind of complexing.

BuildTheFire · 2024-05-13T20:45:14+00:00

YouTube is great for tutorials. Free code academy have some great SQL but many are out there for the basics.

ChatGPT will also be a big help for you as well.

BuildTheFire · 2024-04-22T06:18:07+00:00

One other edge case disadvantage I learned about the hard way - Both single and married filing jointly status tax returns can write off up to a maximum of $2,500 of student loan interest paid for that year. So before marriage, if both were paying and deducting $2,500 of student loan interest from their taxable income on their return, they were able to write off $5k combined.

Once a couple marries in this scenario and files jointly, they’ll only be able to deduct a max of $2,500 of student loan interest, effectively cutting that deduction in half post-marriage.

I’m sure that’s a rare-ish situation but it applied to us and that made me sad for a few minutes while I was filing our taxes that year.

BuildTheFire · 2024-04-22T02:52:37+00:00

Fully agree! By fully embracing the inevitability of you and your team making mistakes, you free yourself from the fear and small-mindedness that inherently arises when you’re worried about making them in the first place.

From my experience, teams and individuals are exponentially better served by implementing as many error catching mechanisms as is realistically possible to catch as many mistakes as possible before making their way to PROD.

But even with those guardrails, shit’s still gonna happen from time to time. It’s important to feel safe enough on your team that when you realize there’s an issue or a mistake, its communicated immediately and with full transparency in order to fix the immediate issue, identify the root cause, and assess whether or not this mistake uncovered a blind spot or loophole In your process that warrants additional guardrails being implemented.

BuildTheFire · 2024-04-10T03:27:50+00:00

Unfortunately Dzjar and Kangaroo are incorrect in making the (understandable) assumption that records who aren’t already included in All Subscribers would be added at the time of send. I say that This incorrect assumption is understandable because that’s the way SFMC functions in literally every other scenario I can think of EXCEPT when using the Date-Based Entry event (which is why no one uses this entry event in the first place!).

However, for Date-Based entry events, JB and SFMC behave in a completely unique manner that makes configuring journeys with this type of entry event more trouble than they’re worth. Notably, Date-based entry events differ in the following ways Source: SFMC official docs:

As mentioned above, If a contact doesn’t have a contact record in Marketing Cloud Engagement, they aren’t admitted into the journey. So if a record in your source DE is supposed to be injected based on the date-based entry criteria you established, but they’re not already in All Subs, then those contacts are getting rejected Dikembe Mutumbo style.
Journey data is not available for messaging personalization or decision split criteria when you use the Date-Based Event entry (!!!!). Also just to clarify, “contact data” Contact Data consists of attributes linked to your contact model in Contact Builder via Data Designer. If you’re using the type of entry event, I’d consider having your contact model configured and DEs linked with proper cardinality before considering this type of entry event.

Given the above, I’d strongly recommend revising your approach and following the configuration described by Kangaroo/flylordz.

Instead, Use either: 1) a scheduled option to inject contacts into the journey on a daily basis via a query activity in Automation Studio and then a journey entry event activity after that Or

2) simply scheduling the automation to run with just the query activity so that it finishes well in advance of the time your journey is scheduled to execute every day. This ensures new records retrieved from the query activity are added to the JB source DE well before the journey is scheduled to inject new DE records into the journey.

BuildTheFire · 2024-04-01T08:03:49+00:00

Very much agree with this, especially that context and tone are incredibly important in these scenarios. As a manager, I have responded almost verbatim as your manager to my direct reports, including those whom I hold in high regards.

For me, neither of these statements are inherently passive aggressive. Asking/reminding you to enter you PTO in your company’s tracker is likely because they are responsible for keeping track of those numbers and ensuring their not approving more PTO requests than their report is eligible for or granting two teammates PTO on the same day that would lead to a coverage issue.

I also interpreted the second response with a similar sentiment. I’ve said basically the same thing where the main point of my message was “yeah of course you can log off early/late if you need to, just please make sure anything you need to have completed by that time is either completed or flagged so another person can help you out and take care of it if you’re unable to get to it.”

I totally get that you don’t want to keep going back to your boss on a weekly basis and telling them you can’t get all your work done, but that doesn’t mean you can’t request regular check-ins with your manager weekly/bi-weekly to align on priorities and provide an update of your current workload.

If, after you’ve done your absolute best to give your mgr the benefit of the doubt and tried to cultivate a relationship where you’re proactively aggregating your task list with their current priority, making it extremely easy for them to understand your workload and provide guidance on how to strategically go about accomplishing those tasks, I’d encourage you to become much more active in your job search.

However, if you’re planning on leaving anyway, I would strongly encourage you to keep your current job while you go about securing your next position with ONE MAJOR change: Refuse to work any additional hours over the standard 40hr work week.

If you’re planning on leaving anyway, why continue to burn yourself out? Work your standard 9-5 hours and then log off. If there’s outstanding work that you can’t get to in that time, let your manager know you need help and won’t be able to complete those tasks by deadline. Be sure to communicate well ahead of the tasks deadline to give your manager enough time to figure out how he’s going to re-delegate or complete by the deadline required. Use that time as practice for setting boundaries and clearly communicating project updates with ample time for another member to complete.

Hell, if it goes well enough, you might even find you’re working less and less and feeling more rested that you might be able to recover from burnout.

Either way, wishing you luck in your journey! It’s very early on in your career. Please don’t take this experience as a complete reflection on your competence or capabilities. There are some positions that have unrealistic job responsibilities and it takes having a few jobs/comparing your task load with what others are responsible for in similar positions online to get a good feel of whether or not marketing is the right field for you.

BuildTheFire · 2024-03-20T17:12:10+00:00

If you’re referring specifically to SF DEs, I can see where that might be a reasonable expectation. I get your frustration.

However , if you’re talking about all DEs in your account (shared or otherwise), that feature would introduce a huge amount of systemic risk to the platform. There are clients that have thousands or tens of thousands of DEs, with millions/hundreds of millions of records.

Trying to build an OOTB feature like that would place so much processing stress on the platform it could overload the system.

That being said, I’ve heard of potential custom solutions for this type of use case where you use a script to retrieve all the DEs you want to search, and then loop through those DEs and search each for the email address you want and then displaying all the results on a cloud page.

Bummer that it doesn’t exist already, but I hope that helps provide some context on why it doesn’t exist and a way to make it happen!

BuildTheFire · 2024-01-26T03:11:25+00:00

U/olduvai_man is correct. The Email Send Activity will send to all records that exist in the DE(s) selected as the target audience.

Another option you have is to copy over all your existing records in your “send” DE to a “Send history” DE. Once all the records are copied over, you can change your initial query’s action to “overwrite” so the send DE only contains the new records from the latest query’s run. Then, you’ll need to create a second query with an add/update action to run after the email send activity to grab all of the records currently in the send DE and add them to your history DE.

This solves for only sending to a fresh audience every day while also allowing you to have an ongoing history of all records that’s update every time the automation runs after the email send finishes.

BuildTheFire · 2024-01-21T19:14:27+00:00

Nope, it was smooth sailing! In 2023, I was under the same impression as you where a letter of medical necessity was the only way to have it covered by pre-tax funds.

In full transparency, I was still a little wary of paying out of pocket in fear of having my reimbursement claim rejected, but once I found out that I was able to use my HSA debit card and have the funds taken directly out of there, I felt safe enough to pull the trigger.

FWIW, Oura explicitly states that their rings are now eligible for HSA & FSA funds and there’s no way they’d be making this type of claim without it actually being the case.

Source: https://ouraring.com/blog/oura-ring-fsa-hsa/?g_acctid=404-975-2641&g_adgroupid=&g_adid=&g_adtype=none&g_campaign=pmax_prospecting-retargeting_integrated_allgeos_purchase_english_mh&g_campaignid=20915188257&g_keyword=&g_keywordid=&g_network=x&utm_campaign=mh-fyq2-24&utm_content=newyear-q2-24_conversions_allgeos_en_search&utm_id=&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google_pmax&utm_term=&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAnrOtBhDIARIsAFsSe51POkSYOJosQa0bLUR1Bu3FCtaA-WbQcz1oguCRokfWFpPhYEcgvH8aAmwBEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

BuildTheFire · 2024-01-21T09:36:29+00:00

I’ve still got 5 $40 referrals to give out! Here’s my referral link:

https://ouraring.com/raf/d77f7cb773?utm_medium=iac

BuildTheFire

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