What I have learned from using API’s.

Since, I have been living inside API documentation for Canvas LMS and building my own API for work. It just makes sense to talk about it.

Hello It’s Brien! Your friendly data nerd.

It has been officially, my second year as a data analyst. We can safe to say that my position has become more technical in nature than before. The reason is because the biggest impact at this organization is having a really solid data architecture and database. It is hard to analyst things when everything is every where. One of those things that I got to interact with a lot are API’s. Because education uses so many third part systems such as Infinite campus, Canvas, and whatever software is best for teachers and administrators.

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Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

There have been a few things that dominated my second year. Those have been SQL, Python and APIs. I know it isn’t starting to sound more like a data engineering role than analyst. But, you are here to be above average analyst. Knowing some data engineering will go for. There was a 40% increase in demand for that work. The reason for that is most likely AI, but second it is because there are business that want to look at their data. But if you don’t engineer it right, then you cannot.

If you want a much more deeper dive in Python and SQL, you are welcomed to my other newsletters to do that:

Let’s move on to APIs.

WHAT IS AN API?

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API stands for Application Programming Interface which means nothing to you now. Up to this point, I am guessing you know what a database is and maybe how to query data out of it.

Let’s say you want to access someone else’s database in a legal way or you want data to move between two systems.

This is where an API comes into play.

Maybe you want to have the report on a schedule or let’s say you want this data structured differently coming from their database.

Anyways this API acts like a middle man between these two systems.

To get this data you need to put in a REQUEST. And there are different types of request that you can do.

Request

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These are the basic requests that you can do with an API:

• GET

• POST

• PUT/PATCH

• DELETE

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• GET for a data analyst is just “getting” the data.

• POST is when you “post” data in a database like posting a post on Substack. (I’ll stop lol)

• PUT is when you want to update data without deleting the other existing data on a table.

• DELETE is just deleting data.

To pull data out with Python, you can use this code. This code is a GET request: 

import requests

url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1"

response = requests.get(url)

if response.status_code == 200:

    data = response.json()

    print(data)

else:

    print(f"Error: {response.status_code}")

Security and Limits of Request

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Onto more interesting and deeper dive into an API.

Here are my tips to using them:

• Understand rate limits

• File size

• API Tokens

Having an API can be a security risk to your database because anyone can (if it is public) take data out of your database.

This is why there are rate limits, file size and API Tokens.

Understand rate limits

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First off, a rate limit is how much data you can pull out of the database at a time through the API. The reason for this is because if you have a lot of users using your API at once, this could slow down the database or even make it not functional at all.

The other reason is to slow down hackers from abusing your database as well.

File size

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Secondly is file size, this could be when you input data into the database. You might mess up someone’s database by putting too much data at once. For example they could have a file size limit of 100 MB. So you will have to do multiple requests to the api to get more than that data. 

Another example of a limit based on file size is pages. 

Just like above, you can have bad actors do the same by putting in a big file.

API Tokens

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Thirdly and most importantly, API Tokens. This is how I would explain them. They are like a key to a door that is locked. The door for this key to go into is the API. And what walks through this door is the data that you wanted. That’s through a GET request. 

If you found this useful, please give me a like or a comment below. Hope you have a wonderful Sunday!