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Prefect and Census Partnership Announcement | Census

Katy Yuan
Katy Yuan November 02, 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.

Our goal at Census is to help data engineers extend the impact of their work and automate with confidence, which is why we're thrilled to formally announce our partnership with Prefect.

This blog was originally written by Andrew Black, Head of Partnerships at Prefect. See Prefect's announcement here!

Data engineers have often shied away from pushing data to SaaS tools because it can get messy and hard to maintain. But Census solves the “last mile” data activation problem and easily syncs data to over 100 of the most popular business tools.

Census gets better data into users’ hands, all orchestrated and viewed from the best dataflow automation tool: Prefect.

Map of Census and Prefect synergy within modular Modern Data Stack

Not another dashboard, please

In an ideal world, data producers and data consumers work together to provide accurate, timely, and usable insights for decision makers at all levels of an organization.

Many companies build a single source of truth by collecting, formatting, and cleaning customer data and storing it in a data warehouse. 

Traditionally, they make that centralized data accessible through BI and reporting tools such as Looker or Tableau.

This might work well for data analysts and finance teams who prefer to work with raw data, but for a lot of teams – particularly the revenue and marketing organizations – it’s not efficient. In fact there’s a term for this, NADP: “Not Another Dashboard Please.” (OK, I just made that up but it’s pretty catchy, right?) 

Every organization wants to be “data-driven.” Looking at data through BI tools only makes you “data-informed” – it doesn’t inspire action. Simply collecting and analyzing data is no longer a competitive advantage in any market.

While dashboards were a good stopgap solution, the rise of Reverse ETL means you can free the data that was formerly locked in BI reports.

Reverse ETL is the best way to activate data

Reverse ETL represents a category of tools that “push” data from disparate sources (though typically a data warehouse) and make it available in end-user SaaS tools such as Salesforce, Zendesk or Marketo. An example would be a salesperson viewing not just open opportunities for a customer, but also product activity, CSAT, or payment history without leaving their CRM. 

Reverse ETL: From the data warehouse to operational tools

This might sound like a simple problem to solve: can’t you just run ETL or ELT in reverse?

Turns out it’s not that simple. Every SaaS tool has unique formats, API quotas, and rate limits, and every implementation requires further customization. Keeping data flowing accurately into these systems is a big challenge, and that’s why Reverse ETL tools are such a breakthrough.

Census was the first to market with a Reverse ETL solution for the modern data stack, and it continues to be a leader with one of the most comprehensive integration sets, fastest data processing speeds, and reliability. Its G2 reviews demonstrate the love it has garnered with users. 

As with many category creators, they’re also thought leaders in the space. They advocate not just for putting data where the users are, but also what that can enable for data teams: namely, freeing up time to work on more valuable things such as defining and maintaining centralized, trusted performance metrics. 

Prefect 🤝 Census: Better together

Prefect and Census have been working together for a while. We developed a Census integration for Prefect 1.0, and lots of joint users have enjoyed the benefits. With our latest Census integration for Prefect 2.0 (“collection” and “block” in Prefect 2.0 terms), our tools are easier to use together and more powerful. We’ve done a number of events together and our teams enjoy working together as much as we love delighting our customers. To us, that’s the foundation for a fantastic partnership.

Ok, enough of the background…what can data engineers do with Prefect and Census together?

  • Trigger Census syncs based on upstream tasks and events.
  • Reduce time to resolution for failed pipelines by enabling automated actions within the pipeline, or by better surfacing errors that assist with troubleshooting.
  • Communicate data status to end users so they know the freshness of their data, and the reason for any delay.
  • See the status of Census syncs the in Prefect Coordination Plane, along with all your other dataflows. 

And because Census has a designated Block in Prefect Cloud, setup and reuse in Prefect is a breeze. You get:

  • Fresher, more reliable data for end users
  • Fewer support tickets
  • Faster issue resolution
  • Significantly less development time and maintenance

The net impact? More effective and efficient data engineering and analytics, and happier, more productive end users who act with confidence.

If you’d like to try it out, learn how to get started with Prefect 2.0 and Census.

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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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