FAQ: What is Currents and how does it work?

Currents consists of integrations with several partners, "Connectors", who can receive data. Whenever an event occurs within the system, Braze tracks it and forwards it to the Connector that you have enabled.

With Currents, you are able to export two categories of events:

• Message Engagement Events
  Events associated with messages sent via Braze, such as Email Clicks, Mobile Push Opens, In-App Message Impressions, and much more.

• User Behavior Events
  Events associated with customer behavior, such as Sessions, Custom Events, and Purchases.

Event Delivery Semantics

It's important to remember that although all timestamps exported by Currents are sent in the UTC timezone, Braze also sends IANA timezone data in a 'timezone' field. Please be aware of this time difference and ensure that your ETL scripts are updated accordingly in order to reconcile data across export methods.

'ID' - Unique Identifiers
As a high-throughput system, Currents guarantees at-least-once delivery of events, meaning that duplicate events can occasionally be sent. If your use case requires exactly-once semantics, you can use the unique identifier field that is sent with every event ("id") to deduplicate events.

But Why Avro?

The Braze Currents data storage integrations output data in the .avro format (learn more here). We chose Avro because it is a flexible data format that natively supports schema evolution and is supported by a wide variety of data products.

Key Benefits of using the Avro File Type

• Avro is supported by nearly every major data warehouse.

• Avro compresses better than CSV and JSON.

• Avro requires schemas when data is written or read. Most interesting is that you can use different schemas for serialization and deserialization, and Avro will handle the missing/extra/modified fields Schemas can be evolved over time to handle the addition of fields and Avro will handle natively.

Syntax

• integration-id : The unique ID for this Currents integration.

• event-type : The type of the event in the file (see event list below).

• date : The hour that events are processed. Formatted YYYY-MM-DD-HH.

• schema-id : Used to version .avro schemas for backwards-compatibility (integer)