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Connector Improvement: Enable Filtering of Facebook Actions to Avoid Millions of Wasted Rows

Completed
Jeff Snyder User
  • Edited

When applying a breakdown to Facebook there can often be many resulting rows that are completely unnecessary for our purposes. For example, actions that we'll never need to report on. At the ad-level this can be millions of wasted rows.

The Facebook API allows you to filter the query to specific actions, so I see no reason we shouldn't be able to take advantage of that. Please open up this functionality to your users.

If we have to write out the filter code, so be it. It doesn't need a pretty UI, just please allow us to add filters to the query. 

Here's an example: 

Out of 1,156 rows for this one account on a single day, only 70 of these rows are useful. That's 94% waste in what is our largest facebook table. In our business, this amounts to 2M-3M rows each month. 

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Comments

4 comments

Date Votes
  • Official comment
    Lucas Alexander Fivetranner

    Hi all,

    Just reviewing and closing old threads. Fivetran now supports row filtering across all our connectors, so it is possible to filter any rows you don't need downstream: https://fivetran.com/docs/using-fivetran/features/row-filter#rowfiltering. 

    I'm going to mark this feature as completed.

    Thanks for submitting, commenting on, and following this feature request. 

    Cheers,
    Luke

  • Jeff Snyder User

    Is this something that could be implemented? Is clearly supported by the API. 

  • Marko Jamedzija User

    Hi!

    We have exactly the same problem. In our case, in our setup for the Facebook Ads connector, we have a couple of custom reports that use action_type action breakdown (same as in the request above), but this produces 10s of thousands of records on daily basis due to all action types being pulled - where we just need one of them.

    The lack of filtering (concretely, to choose a specific action_type) is driving our costs significantly, thus forcing us to give up on action breakdowns. Therefore, we'd also urge you in enabling this, (as said above, it's already supported by the Facebook API).

    Thanks!

  • Charlie Harvey User

    I want the same thing by for MySQL. Really need the ability to not take every row to keep costs down.