Product News

New in May: Observability tools, Access controls, & Summer of Data! | Census

Katy Yuan
Katy Yuan May 31, 2022

Katy is a Product Marketing Manager at Census who loves diving into startups, SaaS technology, and modern data platforms. When she's not working, you can find her playing pickleball or Ultimate Frisbee.

Are you ready for the Summer of Data? 😎 Grab your sunglasses because this summer we’re going all out to help you stand out like a flamingo 🦩 in your data career with events, community, and some sweet summer swag. Read on!

Also, don’t forget to leave us a review on G2 in exchange for a $50 gift card!

🎉 New Features

Sync with Confidence

We announced an entire set of ✨ warehouse-centric observability ✨ capabilities that ensure data quality for reverse ETL, so data teams can sync data into downstream business tools with confidence (and without all the bug smashing). 🐛

👉 Read the blog announcement or watch the product showcase on-demand

Role-Based Access Controls

Census admins can easily assign user roles to secure access to sensitive data and empower better collaboration between data & ops. Empower end users to self-serve with Census, without worrying that they’ll sync the wrong data, break data models, or change business logic.

👉 Read the full announcement

🔗 Connectors

New

Enhancements

See the changelog for improvements to Braze, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Shopify, and more!

🦩 Join us for the Summer of Data

Community, events, and swag – what more can you ask for?! Plus the new weekly Stand Out Data Show featuring our Data Community Advocate Parker Rogers interviewing data practitioners like Felipe Hoffa and Julie Beynon.

👉 Claim your free summer swag (USA only, sorry!)

💡 OA in Action: How Crossbeam uses partner data to personalize sales conversations and drive product-led growth

Matt Nicosia, Director of Growth at Crossbeam, shared with us how he uses operational analytics to help his sales team have more personalized conversations. They also use partner data to recommend integrations to existing customers, automating product adoption and upsells. That’s just a couple of the ways Crossbeam is driving growth with reverse ETL.

👉 Read more on Crossbeam’s blog

🗓 Live Sessions

Upcoming - Register Now!

A Modern Guide to Operationalizing Customer Churn PredictionThursday June 9th, 10 am PT

  • Learn how to handle the essential complexities of predicting customer churn for your unique business and how tools like Continual and Census make it easy to generate and deploy predictions into customer engagement systems.

[Select Stars Show & Tell] Spreedly saves 1 hour a day with Looker + CensusWednesday June 22nd, 10 am PT

  • See how payments platform Spreedly operationalizes warehouse data for marketing personalization and Product-Led Growth with Looker + Census, and learn how to calculate Return on Analytics (ROA) and measure the data team's impact on the business.

See more: Census Events

🎁 Earn a $50 gift card for sharing your feedback

The recent customer love on G2 has been incredible! G2 reviews really help us establish crucial social proof as a growing startup, so we really appreciate your support.

Review Census on G2, and we’ll send you a $50 gift card as a thank you!

Questions, concerns, feedback?

Join us on Slack in the OA Club or reach out through email. We’d love to hear from you!

P.S. We’re hiring! Join us 🥳

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Sync data 100x faster on Snowflake with Census Live Syncs
Sync data 100x faster on Snowflake with Census Live Syncs

For years, working with high-quality data in real time was an elusive goal for data teams. Two hurdles blocked real-time data activation on Snowflake from becoming a reality: Lack of low-latency data flows and transformation pipelines The compute cost of running queries at high frequency in order to provide real-time insights Today, we’re solving both of those challenges by partnering with Snowflake to support our real-time Live Syncs, which can be 100 times faster and 100 times cheaper to operate than traditional Reverse ETL. You can create a Live Sync using any Snowflake table (including Dynamic Tables) as a source, and sync data to over 200 business tools within seconds. We’re proud to offer the fastest Reverse ETL platform on the planet, and the only one capable of real-time activation with Snowflake. 👉 Luke Ambrosetti discusses Live Sync architecture in-depth on Snowflake’s Medium blog here. Real-Time Composable CDP with Snowflake Developed alongside Snowflake’s product team, we’re excited to enable the fastest-ever data activation on Snowflake. Today marks a massive paradigm shift in how quickly companies can leverage their first-party data to stay ahead of their competition. In the past, businesses had to implement their real-time use cases outside their Data Cloud by building a separate fast path, through hosted custom infrastructure and event buses, or piles of if-this-then-that no-code hacks — all with painful limitations such as lack of scalability, data silos, and low adaptability. Census Live Syncs were born to tear down the latency barrier that previously prevented companies from centralizing these integrations with all of their others. Census Live Syncs and Snowflake now combine to offer real-time CDP capabilities without having to abandon the Data Cloud. This Composable CDP approach transforms the Data Cloud infrastructure that companies already have into an engine that drives business growth and revenue, delivering huge cost savings and data-driven decisions without complex engineering. Together we’re enabling marketing and business teams to interact with customers at the moment of intent, deliver the most personalized recommendations, and update AI models with the freshest insights. Doing the Math: 100x Faster and 100x Cheaper There are two primary ways to use Census Live Syncs — through Snowflake Dynamic Tables, or directly through Snowflake Streams. Near real time: Dynamic Tables have a target lag of minimum 1 minute (as of March 2024). Real time: Live Syncs can operate off a Snowflake Stream directly to achieve true real-time activation in single-digit seconds. Using a real-world example, one of our customers was looking for real-time activation to personalize in-app content immediately. They replaced their previous hourly process with Census Live Syncs, achieving an end-to-end latency of <1 minute. They observed that Live Syncs are 144 times cheaper and 150 times faster than their previous Reverse ETL process. It’s rare to offer customers multiple orders of magnitude of improvement as part of a product release, but we did the math. Continuous Syncs (traditional Reverse ETL) Census Live Syncs Improvement Cost 24 hours = 24 Snowflake credits. 24 * $2 * 30 = $1440/month ⅙ of a credit per day. ⅙ * $2 * 30 = $10/month 144x Speed Transformation hourly job + 15 minutes for ETL = 75 minutes on average 30 seconds on average 150x Cost The previous method of lowest latency Reverse ETL, called Continuous Syncs, required a Snowflake compute platform to be live 24/7 in order to continuously detect changes. This was expensive and also wasteful for datasets that don’t change often. Assuming that one Snowflake credit is on average $2, traditional Reverse ETL costs 24 credits * $2 * 30 days = $1440 per month. Using Snowflake’s Streams to detect changes offers a huge saving in credits to detect changes, just 1/6th of a single credit in equivalent cost, lowering the cost to $10 per month. Speed Real-time activation also requires ETL and transformation workflows to be low latency. In this example, our customer needed real-time activation of an event that occurs 10 times per day. First, we reduced their ETL processing time to 1 second with our HTTP Request source. On the activation side, Live Syncs activate data with subsecond latency. 1 second HTTP Live Sync + 1 minute Dynamic Table refresh + 1 second Census Snowflake Live Sync = 1 minute end-to-end latency. This process can be even faster when using Live Syncs with a Snowflake Stream. For this customer, using Census Live Syncs on Snowflake was 144x cheaper and 150x faster than their previous Reverse ETL process How Live Syncs work It’s easy to set up a real-time workflow with Snowflake as a source in three steps:

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Why Census Embedded?
Why Census Embedded?

Last November, we shipped a new product: Census Embedded. It's a massive expansion of our footprint in the world of data. As I'll lay out here, it's a natural evolution of our platform in service of our mission and it's poised to help a lot of people get access to more great quality data.