Leveraging Simba Drivers and SDKs to Minimize Tech Debt

Tech debt is the price developers pay for quick fixes that require future rework. When deadlines loom, it’s inevitable to focus on what’s most critical. In the short term, cutting corners keeps your release schedule intact and your applications seemingly smooth. But once the immediate pressure lifts, you’re left with the nagging awareness that your team will eventually face a significant rework, resulting in a technical debt casting a shadow over your daily tasks.

One process to not underestimate is driver development. It’s easy to underestimate driver development because the first leg of the process moves quickly. You establish a connection, return some data, and move on. The rest is what consumes most of the engineering effort.

Tech debt can pile up in unexpected ways, particularly when dealing with data connectivity challenges. Consider an organization that needs to create a dashboard for an unsupported data source. A junior developer might resort to extracting data into Excel, as the existing BI tools don’t support direct connections to the necessary web data. The developer then builds a basic dashboard using this data. Initially, everything seems fine—the dashboard functions as required. However, this approach introduces a maintenance issue. Each time new data is needed, someone must manually extract and load it into the dashboard.

Now, imagine if the data source was more complex, prompting the team to involve a developer to write custom code to bridge the connection. This workaround might work temporarily, but it creates a hidden tech debt. If the developer leaves the company or changes roles, maintaining the dashboard becomes a challenge. Additionally, changes to the target system could break the custom code, leading to potential data discrepancies or system failures. In both scenarios, tech debt accumulates, posing long-term risks to the organization’s data infrastructure and operational efficiency.

The True Cost of Tech Debt

In today’s business climate, the push for profitability often forces development teams to extract maximum value from existing tech investments. This pressure can lead to rushed decisions, introducing unstable elements just to meet leadership’s growth demands.

As your organization grows, even these strong foundations may face challenges, such as outdated components or unsupported libraries, necessitating careful management to avoid tech debt. Amidst supporting growth, sticking to tight schedules, and fixing bugs, the need for upgrades and maintenance can be sidelined. However, delaying these essential tasks only deepens your tech debt, making it harder to catch up. So, when your framework can no longer install security patches, it exposes your systems to potential vulnerabilities.

How Simba SDK (Software Development Kit) Can Reduce Your Tech Debt

To minimize tech debt, Simba SDK gives your team a production-ready foundation for building custom drivers. Instead of writing query parsing, schema discovery, and authentication logic from scratch, you inherit 30 years of connectivity engineering, the same foundation Google, Databricks, and Snowflake use for their enterprise drivers.

Your developers focus on what’s unique to your data source: the API calls, query processing, the response mapping, and the authentication flow. The SDK handles SQL execution, metadata exposure, pushdown optimization, and the BI tool compatibility issues that consume months of debugging time.

When you build on Simba SDK, you start with:

A complete SQL engine

Parse and execute SQL queries even when your data source doesn’t support querying at all. CSV files, REST APIs, and proprietary formats. The SDK handles query operations so you don’t build an execution engine from scratch.

Automatic schema mapping

Convert nested, semi-structured data into the tabular format BI tools expect. The SDK discovers and exposes metadata so applications can browse tables, inspect columns, and build queries without manual data modeling.

Built-in pushdown logic

The SDK intelligently routes operations to the source system when supported and handles them locally when not. You define what your source can do; the SDK optimizes accordingly.

Enterprise authentication out of the box

OAuth, SSO, Kerberos, FIPS compliance—implemented and tested across thousands of production deployments. Your driver inherits enterprise-grade security without your team becoming authentication specialists.

REST-specific tooling

The SDK includes specialized components for REST API sources: authentication flows, pagination handling, throttling, and response format parsing. Since most modern SaaS applications expose REST APIs, this covers a significant portion of the connectivity landscape.

With Simba SDK, you focus on what’s unique to your data source: how to authenticate, how to translate requests into your API calls, query processing, and how to map responses to rows and columns. The SDK handles the rest.

Your team can build connectivity, but standard processes run the risk of accumulating costly tech debt. When tech debt accumulates, every hour spent on driver maintenance is an hour not spent on the features that differentiate your platform. Simba SDK lets you ship drivers faster, support more sources, and keep your best engineers focused on what makes your product worth buying. Ready to learn more? Watch our video on what it actually means to build a driver.

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