Arch Customer Story

Sept 19, 2024 • 5 Min Read

Choosing the Right Database for Arch’s Analytics Platform

How Tembo enabled the neighborhood data team

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About Arch

Arch empowers data teams, consultancies, and anyone needing data solutions—from ELT to visualizations—without the time, expertise, or budget for a dedicated team. Evolving from Meltano, an open-source project spun out of GitLab, Arch provides a complete data platform launched in October 2023. This shift coincided with our decision to choose Tembo as our data warehouse provider.

Tembo Simplifies Database Operations for Arch

We opted for Postgres as our database foundation due to its robust support for data loading, transformation tools like dbt and cube, and seamless integration with various BI tools. Postgres excels in the data ecosystem, allowing users with SQL skills to leverage existing knowledge.

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Choosing the Right Database for Arch’s Analytics Platform

Arch empowers data teams, consultancies, and anyone needing analytical data solutions—from ELT to visualizations—without the time, expertise, or budget for a dedicated team. To power this ambitious vision, they needed a database that would support connectivity to various tools, allowing easy provisioning of a fleet of instances and support for diverse use cases and data needs on their platform. With limited internal database expertise, whatever database solution they chose needed to allow them to power a variety of use cases while “outsourcing” database expertise (tuning, alerts, etc.) to their database provider.

Tembo Simplifies Database Operations on Postgres

Postgres was a natural choice as the database foundation for Arch’s developers due to its support for a variety of use cases and integration with data-loading transformation tools like dbt and Cube and visualization tools. Postgres also excels in the data ecosystem, allowing users who want direct query access to use all of their existing skills. For internal applications, Arch considered NoSQL for rapid development; however, PostgreSQL offered the flexibility and power required for all their use cases. Tembo's API-driven approach, with individual instance customization and access via REST API, allows for effortless scaling without manual configuration. This ensures each customer receives a pre-configured and tuned Tembo instance (i.e. stack), avoiding delays and errors during implementation.

“Because we chose Postgres, Tembo just seemed like a natural fit. Tembo helped us stand with a fleet of managed databases quickly with individual tendencies for each customer, via a REST API, allowing us to be agile as a team. In addition, the level of support and response times we’ve gotten from the Tembo team have been phenomenal; just knowing that we have such easy access to this quality of Postgres expertise makes us feel like a partner, not just a customer.”

Cody Hanson

Engineering Manager, Arch.dev

Tembo’s Data Warehouse Stack: Rapid Iteration and Efficient Setup

Predictable billing is crucial for a software-focused company like Arch. The Tembo platform provides a cost-effective and manageable alternative to providers such as Amazon RDS and Snowflake, helping Arch avoid the high costs of alternative data warehouse providers. Arch’s product requires spinning up data warehouses of all sizes for their customers. Tembo gives Arch a variety of instance sizes they can deploy instantly, which gives them predictability and flexibility, to upgrade and downgrade as needed. For advanced use cases and larger customers, Arch can leverage Tembo's data warehouse stack for optimized columnar storage without needing to change their database provider or introduce an “overkill” tool like Snowflake into their architecture.

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Arch + Tembo: Streamlined Cost-effective Workflow

Tembo allows Arch to easily spin up a fleet of databases of any size, in less than 2 minutes, eliminating the need for frequent re-platforming as different customers have different needs. Additionally, Tembo streamlines operations and keeps costs down by avoiding the need for specialized expertise for each data platform. Arch has used both Terraform and the Tembo API for fast programmatic provisioning and has now built a custom API client based on Tembo's open API specifications. Once onboarded, each Arch customer receives a Tembo instance (or set of instances) tailored to their specific needs. Customers often transition their proof-of-value instances to production after contracting. Arch also offers dedicated development instances for specific customer requirements.

Conclusion: A Strong Foundation

Tembo has been instrumental in building our platform. An ideal database operates quietly and efficiently, handling complex tasks without constant intervention. While no database achieves absolute perfection, Tembo comes remarkably close.  Through its robust functionality and ease of use, Tembo empowers Arch to deliver exceptional value to our customers.

“Tembo makes Postgres easy for us. We don’t have to worry about spinning up or tuning it. We get stacks that just work out of the box, and we know they are going to be tuned without having to do a spike. We now use Tembo to manage a fleet of over 20 production instances and a number of non-prod and development environments, and we’re excited to leverage Tembo for larger and larger workloads as our customers ask us for more specialized use cases. Tembo has become so fundamental to our platform that we don’t even think about alternatives anymore. When you’re not spending time thinking about your database, that’s how you know it’s a good solution.”

Cody Hanson

Engineering Manager, Arch.dev

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