Product News

Introducing Workspaces: Organize your syncs by team or project

Katy Yuan
Katy Yuan October 27, 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.

Earlier this year, we released role-based access controls that enable customers to secure access to sensitive data while empowering more experimentation for business users.

In that same vein, we’re excited to release Workspaces, the next level of governance for your Census account. 

Workspaces enable you to manage permissions granularly for different teams, projects, or use cases. You can organize syncs and models in Workspaces however you wish.

For example, you can give your Sales team and your Marketing team their own little slices of Census, or keep your staging environment separate from production.

Allocating Workspaces and roles based on least privilege provides peace of mind, ensuring only those with appropriate permissions can access sensitive user information.

Compute costs are expensive. Mistakes can be costly. But mistakes are part and parcel of building pipelines. Census workspaces allows us to more clearly delineate mission critical environments from sandboxes. This gives our analysts confidence to iterate on their proof-of-concepts syncs without worrying about breaking production or incurring unintentional compute costs.
- Aaron Krivitzky, Engineer & Tech Lead at Mixpanel

Workspace Roles

The list of Workspaces in your organization is always visible to all members of your organization, but you can control the level of access for members by assigning them a role. Each individual user can have a different role in each individual workspace they belong to. 

Workspace members each have one of four different roles:

  • Owner – This is the default permission for Organization Administrators within a Census organization. It gives the user access to everything, including managing warehouse & destination connections, API keys, and adding/removing users. 
  • Editor – This role grants access to most options in the workspace, including adding and removing connections and creating and editing syncs & models. 
  • Operator – The Operator Role is a special role within Census. It fits between the Editor and Viewer permissions, allowing members with this role to create and edit segments and syncs but only on data models that have been pre-approved for consumption.
  • Viewer - Read-only viewers can view syncs, segments, and approved models, but cannot modify them or take any action within Census. 

For a full list of access details for each role, see the product docs.

Creating a Workspace

To create a new Workspace, hit the "Create Workspace" button from your organization dashboard. Then simply name your new Workspace, decide whether you want to give access to your organization or would prefer to keep it restricted, and you're done!

Creating a new Workspace is easy.

ℹ️ Role-Based Access Controls are available on Platform plans only. Core plans can create up to two Workspaces.

👉 Get a demo of Census or try for free today!

Related articles

Product News
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:

Best Practices
How Retail Brands Should Implement Real-Time Data Platforms To Drive Revenue
How Retail Brands Should Implement Real-Time Data Platforms To Drive Revenue

Remember when the days of "Dear [First Name]" emails felt like cutting-edge personalization?

Product News
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.