Product News

Your one-stop-shop to modern data news: The Operator | Census

Allie Beazell June 28, 2022

Allie Beazell is director of developer marketing @ Census. She loves getting to connect with data practitioners about their day-to-day work, helping technical folks communicate their expertise through writing, and bringing people together to learn from each other. Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, California, United States

We’ve got some exciting news, folks! The brand new Census blog, The Operator, is now live! 🎉

It’s the official Operational Analytics blog, designed specifically to give readers access to knowledge about all things data from Census and community experts alike. As the pioneers of reverse ETL and Operational Analytics, we’re dedicated to making this blog the home of all the expert knowledge of our community (including you!) has to offer. ✨

Why the change? 💇‍♀️

At Census, we believe every team (data, engineering, sales, marketing, success and beyond) should benefit from a single source of truth about their customers so they have the same understanding of who their customers are and how to serve those customers best.

But it’s one thing to have access to that data. It’s another thing completely to really understand what you can do with it. That’s where The Operator comes in. There are so many brilliant folks in our community solving interesting problems every day (some of them even work for us 😉). By surfacing that knowledge here, we’re hopeful that we can all learn from each other and make Operational Analytics a reality for everyone.

TL;DR: We’re a bunch of friendly neighborhood data nerds who believe in a world where data – and knowledge about it – is democratized, and the data team is recognized as the powerhouse of the business. So, we wanted to make our blog a place that empowers all data folks with the accessibility to get the information they need, when they need it.

New features and functionality ✨

Don’t worry – our blog still has the same carefully curated technical wisdom you love; we simply gave it a makeover to modify existing (and add new!) features and functionality. 💄

What can you expect? While we redesigned many of the existing functions, we also added several new features.

A dynamic table of contents (TOC) 👀

Pressed for time or just looking for an answer to your question? We’ve got you covered. With our anchored, left-side navigation, you can jump straight to the sections you’re interested in (without the drag of manually scanning the blog for the information you want).

An example TOC from Never used dbt? Here’s how it can change your data game.

Content search by keyword 🔎

Okay, okay, you can stop cheering now. We know you’ve all been waiting for this – it was by far our most commonly requested feature. And, yes, you guessed it: You can now search for the content topics you want to see in the search bar at the top right of the page (and subscribe to Parker Rogers’s awesome monthly data content roundup while you’re in the top left corner of the blog). 🙏

Enter your keywords and search our entire library of content from the top right corner of the blog site. Add your email into the "Subscribe to OA Digest" box to get Parker's monthly OA Digest newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. ✉️

Faceted search and filtering 🐎

Interested in a specific content type, source, or team (or maybe a few)? We’ve added a search and filter interface to help you get the most out of your blog browsing experience. Just click the filters you’re interested in, hit the “Run query” button, and voilà! You’re off to the races.

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Filter by content type, team, or source (or a combination of the three)! With the new filter function, you can find the content you need, when you need it.

An author index

Have a favorite Census or community author you just can’t get enough of? With our blog revamp, we also launched an author index, allowing you to see all of our authors (with links to their social media profiles) at a glance. If you click on an individual author, you’ll be navigated to the author’s page, highlighting all their accredited, published Census blog articles.

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Browse content from our collection of authors or just learn a thing or two about your favorite writers!

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Related: Interested in writing for The Operator? We’re always looking for more data material from practitioners. You’ll get content support from our editors (and we'll help build your personal brand by promoting your content). Reach out to content marketing manager Nicole Mitich at nicole@getcensus.com to get rolling. 🖋️

Want to get a quick tour of the new blog and its functions? Check out this quick explainer video.👇

We’re really excited to unveil this new generation of the Census blog (and for all the awesome content to come). Go ahead, poke around and explore. Looking for even more awesome data content from the data nerds you know and love? Head on over to The Operational Analytics Club to find even more data expertise to help you learn.

Customer Stories

Built With Census Embedded: Labelbox Becomes Data Warehouse-Native

Every business’s best source of truth is in their cloud data warehouse. If you’re a SaaS provider, your customer’s best data is in their cloud data warehouse, too.

Jeff Sloan April 08, 2024

Best Practices

Keeping Data Private with the Composable CDP

One of the benefits of composing your Customer Data Platform on your data warehouse is enforcing and maintaining strong controls over how, where, and to whom your data is exposed.

Sean Lynch April 05, 2024

Product News

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:

Sean Lynch March 27, 2024

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